Awful Advent #5: Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

For this year’s fifth entry, we find teenagers’ ambitions to escape their small-town life upended by the arrival of a zombie plague. Survival means they’ll have to resort to… singing and dancing in Anna and the Apocalypse!

A pandemic is gradually spreading around the globe and turning people into zombies, but that’s only a rumor on the radio. Of more immediate concern are Anna’s hopes of taking a gap year in Australia after graduation. Her father doesn’t want her to, partly due to finances, partly due to the recent death of her mother. Her friends all have their own concerns—her best friend John is in love with her but too afraid to make a move, student reporter Steph is having her stories dropped from the paper and failing to connect with her fellow students, and Chris is going to fail his media production class if he can’t create a sample video that reveals the real him.

Obviously, all these concerns get tossed over, but never fully disappear, once the zombie apocalypse arrives on the night of the Christmas play. Anna and John wake up safe at their homes and Steph and Chris have taken shelter at the bowling alley. They realize all their friends and family are still at the school and have to make their way there to reunite with the people most important to them. Meanwhile, tensions at the school are rising between those who want to leave to find their missing loved ones and those who want to remain in authority at the school.

And it’s a musical. Because of course it is.

And it’s an absolute delight. I loved this movie, just loved every aspect of it. It’s scrappy, it’s clever, and it has surprisingly subtle character turns. Anna has a douchebag ex-boyfriend who feels, at every moment, like the worst kind of creep. However, he has one line that reveals what all his bravado and cockiness is trying to mask as well as the precise shape of his sense of compassion for her that caught me completely off-guard. In fact, the movie was consistently catching me off-guard even though, much like Shaun of the Dead, there’s a scene early on that more than foreshadows everything that’s going to come.

Which speaks to the two things the movie does very well: it’s precisely constructed and it’s compelling. Looking at it from the perspective of being a coming-of-age/high-school-musical film, there are certain genre conventions you’d expect. While those characters are here, they don’t fall into the expected roles and they each have a meaningful arc. To the other point, I liked all these characters, even the ones I didn’t. They all seemed real to me and their reactions to each other were well-drawn. I believed in their relationships even when they had moments I hadn’t seen in a movie before.

Since the movie is a zombie movie, it naturally isn’t about the zombies but rather about what people do to each other when the status quo is disrupted. Much like Night of the Living Dead, it’s not so much the zombies that are the threat as it is the survivors and the limits of their humanity. Here, that manifests in the role of Vice Principal Savage, a suitably self-righteous authoritarian who’s more than willing to watch everyone die if they don’t respect his leadership. His superciliousness is elevated to the level of sociopathy once the outbreak begins and, frankly, I could have used more of that. We have just brief moments of him belittling Anna because her father is the school janitor and exercising his authority over the students simply because he can, but when he’s revealed to be truly monstrous in the final act of the film, it feels a little rushed, like they needed someone to be the villainous human. There is a director’s cut where he has an additional song that was cut because it made him truly irredeemable, but I work in education. I know that man. He is irredeemable from the moment he gloats to Anna that he’s going to make her father scrub the toilets. Accept that he’s a monster.

As for the film as a musical, I’d say it succeeds on that level as well since I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on repeat since watching the film. The songs are catchy as hell and filled with small references to zombie movies. It’s all just so well done.

Of course, it hits a little differently due to the pandemic. The emotional core of the film is the need to reduce the distance between yourself and your family, to find a way to touch them again after being separated and isolated by this threat that seems to have come from nowhere. There’s even a song about being connected to our phones and screens, but through the lens of turning to these devices for human contact, not likes and clout. Because the movie gets its characters’ core emotions right, it resonates emotionally even though our context has changed.

This is a fun movie, one I loved and am 100% adding to my annual holiday watchlist along with Miracle on 34th Street, Scrooged, and What Would Jesus Buy? Also, unlike The Day of the Beast, the Christmas setting isn’t incidental: characters are gathered at the school due to the Christmas pageant, they have to make their way through a Christmas tree warehouse, and Anna uses a giant candy cane to beat various zombies to death. It leans into the Christmas stuff where The Day of the Beast felt like it was coincidental.

To make things even better, the movie is streaming through both Hoopla and Kanopy—services you may have free access to through your local library.

Libraries rock.

5/5 Scottish Santa-smashing sirens

Anna and the Apocalypse is currently available to stream on Kanopy and Hoopla.

Awful Advent #2: A Cadaver Christmas (2011)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

For this year’s second entry, we have the movie that sparked the idea for the Awful Advent, A Cadaver Christmas!

A bartender and his final customer for the night are watching TV on Christmas Eve when the janitor from the university down the road walks in covered in blood. They ask the janitor to tell them his story while they wait for the police to arrive; he says the university has been taken over by “cadavers.” A police officer with a pervert handcuffed in the back of his car arrives, but the quintet are attacked by three cadavers that must have followed the janitor. The five return to the university to confirm the janitor’s story and to address the threat any way they can.

The 13-movies-in-13-days concept originated from this film’s website, although they call it the “13 Days of Spooky Christmas” (which may be the better title, but I like alliteration). Their movie marathon culminated in an Xmas party with gifts and a horror-themed potluck along with, naturally, a screening of their own movie, which sounds like a real hoot. By the time I’d been introduced to their movie, I’d already been doing my own solstice parties with sundown-to-sunup movie marathons and this flick was a welcome addition to my repertoire (their list of holiday horror films was also a welcome source for inspiration as I see that, unexpectedly, my list this year shares five films with their 2017 one).

As for the movie itself, it’s a scrappy little zombie indie that’s more focused on comedy than on gore or horror, but that’s all right as the jokes, apart from an uncomfortable necrophilia sequence that seems present just for the sake of nudity, generally land. There’s a nice recurring joke about calling 911 that is timed in such a way that it comes back right as I've forgotten about it. The film is very capably composed.

It seems unfair to refer to “the flaws” of this movie. Rather, the seams are visible if you want to look for them. The acting’s not very good. It’s purposefully heightened to make fun of tropes like the working-class tough guy and the at-his-end’s-wit cop, but just feels like they’re trying to do those roles and failing, like they're trying to be camp, and if you try, then you're not. The pacing is a touch wonky with lots of flashbacks of the janitor explaining what happened to set everything in motion. The movie feels like it would be stronger if it were simply told chronologically—the cadavers start walking around, the janitor fights them, and then goes to the bar which sets everything in motion. On this rewatch I got the sense that the flashbacks were a short film done as a proof-of-concept or something shopped around to get investors, and I think that may be the case as the closing credits note that this was adapted from a short made for the 48 Hour Film Project.

Like I said, the seams are visible if you look for them, but you have to look. The movie is buoyed by a sincere and legitimate wit and the filmmakers are very adept at working within their limitations. I noted that Black Friday is palpably hampered by budgetary and COVID restrictions to that movie’s detriment, and A Cadaver Christmas, guaranteed, didn’t have the budget or resources that film had. However, it seems fuller somehow, more memorable and competently made.

Obviously, this is not my first time with this movie. I’ve enjoyed it every time I’ve seen it and I know I’m going to watch it again. I just ordered the (sadly) out-of-print DVD off eBay so that I wouldn’t have to repeat this year’s tactic of streaming it on Tubi. It’s disappointing that this isn’t on more streaming services or available on VOD for purchase or rent because it is one of the more charming holiday horror movies out there. The movie is inventive, funny, and should really be seen more.

4/5 blood-soaked janitors

A Cadaver Christmas is currently available for streaming with ads on Tubi

Awful Advent 2021 #1: Black Friday (2021)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

Starting off Awful Advent, a movie about the “official” start of the Xmas season, Black Friday—and it’s a brand-new movie to boot!

The movie starts on Thanksgiving with an employee at a big box store setting up decorations for the next day’s sales as customers chaotically mill about outside. You can hear muffled shouting, see running silhouettes, and one person flings themselves at the frosted glass of the door while howling.

While he’s hanging a banner, a meteorite smashes through the roof. When he goes to investigate, he finds a pulsating tumorous pink blob with a proboscis which proceeds to spray white goo all over his face (phrasing). He screams as we cut away.

His managers walk the floor, complaining that he hasn’t completed hanging the decorations. They notice something strange, approach, and get attacked by the monster that he’s become.

You get the set-up: a meteorite carrying some alien biology crashes on Earth and starts turning people into monsters. The twist is that it’s happening at a big box store on Black Friday, immediately suggesting parallels between the kinds of customers who would go shopping over that holiday weekend and flesh-eating zombies. Nice enough setup for a horror comedy because it's impossible for it to take itself too seriously with that premise.

On top of all of this, the film features Bruce Campbell as both the store manager and as a producer suggesting we’re going to get some nice Evil Dead/Army of Darkness zombie antics. While the zombies do look decidedly like Deadites, the movie never quite rises to the occasion.

One issue is the film feels very lackadaisical. Not restrained, but like no one is quite giving 100%. To put it another way, it feels like we’re watching the dress rehearsal: everyone knows their part and is hitting their mark, but they’re saving their energy for the next take, the real one, the one that will count. A specific example of this is a scene where the clerks are running from the zombie horde. The zombies look like they’re not so much shambling after the heroes as they are traipsing and clearly making sure they don’t get too close during the shot.

Another issue that compounds that not-quite-100% problem is the film feels, physically, half-empty. The setting is a Toys ‘R’ Us/Best Buy type store, but the shelves are very far apart from each other and sparsely stocked. Because of that, the movie never feels claustrophobic like it should and the characters never feel hemmed in—something necessary for this kind of horror. Likewise, the store never feels crowded. Despite the sequence of all sorts of people coming through the front doors at midnight, we never see a packed store, never see staff trying to maneuver around customers, never even see a line at the registers.

The former we can chalk up to budget restrictions, the latter to COVD restrictions: doesn’t matter if you can afford a lot of extras to stuff into a confined space, you’re (rightly) not allowed to.

All of which is a real shame because it’s not a bad movie, it’s just not where it could be. The underlying metaphor of Black Friday shoppers as a violent threatening mass is both unsubtle and well-chosen. The best zombie movie metaphors tend to track with real-life situations. Plus, just narratively, a massive shopping crowd is going to be moving in strange and unexpected ways so a zombie outbreak could begin in one without the heroes knowing or noticing. You could wring out some real humor and horror with the audience seeing what’s happening while the characters remain ignorant.

Speaking of the characters, these are well-drawn, well-acted, and have some sincerely good moments. There’s a quiet portion where the characters reflect on working in retail. A line that really hit for me was, “Imagine making your living at the place you begged your mom and dad to take you to when you were younger.” The movie isn’t going for the glib, “retail sucks and it’s the customers’ fault” take. Instead, it speaks, just briefly, but enough, and precisely, about what is despairing about that kind of work and how inertia can take over.

Also, how management are a bunch of smarmy, abusive, sadistic pricks which leads us to Bruce Campbell as the store manager. I love Bruce Campbell in everything and he knows the role he’s playing here—smarmy, snarky, cowardly. This really is Ash promoted to upper management. Just as the rest of the movie, though, it’s a little dialed down.

Another instance of “more please” is Michael Jai White, of course. The only film that comes close to having enough Michael Jai White is Black Dynamite and even that’s debatable. He’s a fantastic actor, performer, and presence, and is asked to do nothing here. He doesn’t even get a good death. He just disappears between shots.

I feel like I’m being overly-critical of this movie. Initially I thought I wouldn’t have anything to say about it and here I am at nearly 1000 words. Nothing in this movie is bad, they don’t get anything wrong (even the things that feel wrong, like Executive Producer Devon Sawa having a relationship with the 20-year-younger female lead, are actually addressed and used to good effect), it’s just that everything they get right isn’t quite there. I liked everything this movie had, but it didn’t have enough of any of it.

In the end, it’s fine if you come across it on cable or a streaming service, all right to have on in the background at your solstice party, but not something to hunt down or to add to your annual holiday rotation.

3/5 Kaiju Karens Complaining About Coupons

Black Friday is available for purchase or rental from various online services

214. Oasis of the Zombies

214. Oasis of the Zombies aka La tumba de los muertos vivientes(1982)
Director: Jesús Franco
Writers: Jesús Franco from a story by Ramón Llidó
From: Chilling

Treasure hunters in search of Nazi gold instead suffer the depredations of the zombies haunting the site.

A pair of women in hot pants take a break from driving through the desert to wander through an oasis with the camera cutting to fullframe shots of their butts while they’re walking. This is proto-Michael Bay. Anyway, they find abandoned Nazi gear, then get killed by zombies, and we cut to titles. You know it’s going to be a good one already.

The real start of the movie is a man in a mustache telling another man in a mustache that he knows the location of lost Nazi gold and produces a map. Mustache 2 kills him and leaves to find the treasure. Cut to mustache’s son getting a letter notifying him of his father’s death as well as a letter telling the story of how mustache found the gold.

Flashback to mustache as a British Captain fighting the Nazis in Africa. He sets up an ambush near an oasis, kills all the Nazis, but the entirety of his side is killed as well. A Sheik finds Capt. Mustache and the Sheik’s daughter nurses him back to health. They fall in love and hook up when mustache leaves to return to the war. Two years later, he returns to the Sheik to learn that the woman died giving birth to his son. He goes home only to learn that the Nazis he ambushed were transporting smuggled gold. In the present day, the son decides to go find the gold and his friends come along.

Meanwhile, murderous mustache has arrived at the oasis with his team. His assistants plot against him, but then the zombies kill them. Murderous mustache is attacked, but manages to escape, stumbling and raving about “the living dead.”

Kids arrive, meet murderous mustache just as he dies, and get told vague legends about the oasis and zombies. They meet the Sheik who tells the kid that the Sheik’s daughter was his mother and advises him against going to the oasis. He and his friends go anyway. When they get there, they find another group of treasure hunters they’d met in town dead, except a young woman. She survived the zombie attack, tells them to leave, because zombies, but they decide to stay. And she sticks around.

Despite the zom… but she knows… why would you not just… I mean, she has her own car and…

They start digging for gold, zombies attack that night, and everyone but the main kid and his girlfriend die. Weirdly, they try to fight off the zombies by making a ring of fire around their camp with gasoline... that they take from their Jeep... instead of getting into their Jeep and driving away.

I am shocked by this terrible line.

The couple is found lying in the desert by the Sheik who asks his grandson,

“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I mainly found myself.”

Then they get into the Jeep and drive back to town. THE END

I mean, you know it’s going to be stupid from the start, but, with the initial promise of zombies, Nazis, or even zombie Nazis, you’re hoping for a different kind of stupid, a more delicious exploration of the ridiculous. Instead, there are very few zombies, almost no Nazis (although all the Nazis get killed, which is a plus), and just a rambling group of nobodies going into the desert. We know from the start that the oasis is full of zombies, so it just becomes waiting for the characters to fall into the trap.

Nothing in this movie has consequence. Murderous mustache kills mustache leading the kid to search for the lost gold. However, there’s no meeting between the two where they know the situation, no character moment of them reacting to each other. Everything’s just about getting people to that oasis and filling almost 90 minutes of screen time.

This movie should be in the public domain, but has been GATT’d so it’s not. It is pretty easy to find if you’re so inclined, though. It’s silly enough to be riffable, but maybe too empty and boring even for that. The most laugh-out-loud moments are some of the make-up on the zombies and that final exchange between the Sheik and the kid. It’s 100% unearned and unjustified. “I mainly found myself.” What? How? When was that even part of what this was about? The movie doesn’t really crescendo into absurdity—the final zombie attack is pretty shabby and ignorable—so much as drop a dollop of “What?” on this bland desert dessert. You can safely skip it.

PD Project Horror Part 7

Hey, where have you been?

Ahem. Yes. After some delay I am back and so is the horror. Please, try not to cry. Here we go!

Disc 7

Bluebeard

John Carradine plays an artist who murders the women who sit for his paintings.

This is a PRC picture which means it should be awful, but it's not. It's actually pretty good. I'd go so far as to recommend it unironically, and I don't do that with many movies in this project.

The Corpse Vanishes

Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist who uses the vital fluids of young women to keep his wife alive and beautiful.

An interesting revision of the vampire story. I can't remember much about the movie though.

This was featured as episode 0105 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be downloaded via the Digital Archive Project or watched on YouTube (in 10 parts).

Doomed to Die

Boris Karloff returns for his final performance as the detective Mr. Wong. A shipping tycoon is found shot to death in his office after one of his ships catches fire and sinks.

Not as good at The Fatal Hour, this one drags a little bit. It's fun to note how often Wong has to break the law to solve the mystery. Ends with a disappointing revelation of guilt, but it's okay until then.

Night of the Living Dead

The dead walk! The classic film that redefined our idea of zombies. Fantastic.

Next time, Disc 8: Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr., Max Shreck and none of them talking.

PD Project Horror Part 6

Halfway home. Ladies and gentlemen, the comic book film event of the summer: Italian Spiderman

Disc 6

The Brain that Wouldn't Die

A surgeon who's been working on reanimating dead flesh nearly kills his fiancee in a car accident, salvaging only her head. He starts looking for a woman to kill whose body he can give to his fiancee while his finacee's head rests in a pan, begging for death.

There's quite a lot wonderfully wrong with this picture and I can't, in good conscience, recommend watching it without the MST3K commentary. It's the first episode with Mike on the SOL and it's high-quality even if the movie's not.

This was featured as episode 0513 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased on its own. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Brain That Wouldn't Die.

The Killer Shrews

A group of genetically-engineered giant shrews escape their cage and start menacing people stranded on a deserted island.

Here's a drinking game to suggest to people you want to see die of alcohol poisoning--drink whenever someone on screen drinks. You can even have them pick just one character, they'll still drink themselves to death. You'd think I'm unnecessarily focusing on the alcohol consumption in this movie, but there's really nothing else going on. They drink, get "menaced" by the killer shrews (really dogs with shag carpet draped across their back--clearly friendly dogs at that), drink, talk endlessly about the plot, drink, fall into a cliched and half-hearted love triangle and, oh, what else was there? Oh yeah, drink. Hilariously bad.

This was featured as episode 0407 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased as part of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 7.

King of the Zombies

A plane crashes on an isolated Caribbean island leaving the pilot, an American special agent and his valet at the mercy of a strange German doctor.

If you hop over to the Archive.org page for this movie you'll see a summary of the film in thumbnails and you'll have a pretty good idea of the character of the piece. When I first watched the movie I thought it was the most racist thing I'd ever seen. Then I saw Michael Bay's Transformers. It's not that the film's particularly hateful, it's just the revelatory nature of all these pictures. They all express the latent cultural concepts without thinking about them. What's shocking is the utter disdain that greets Mantan Moreland's character throughout the film.

There are a lot of issues at play. He's playing a stereotypical role, but it's also the role Shaggy and Scooby play in Scooby-Doo. It's the nature of the comic relief in a horor-comedy like this. Things get more complicated in the fact that Moreland's clearly the star. This is an old black and white b-horror and has, of course, a useless white guy as the hero. Moreland has the most compelling scenes. He's funny. I'd go so far as to say it's a good flick--both for his performance and as a window into the culture. Just be ready to shout, "You Nazi bastard!" a lot. It makes things easier.

Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde

The silent picture starring John Barrymore based on the horror classic by Robert Louis Stevenson.

S'alright. It's very good actually. Barrymore's great, the story's great, the production's great, lots of funny moments (many lines unintentionally homoerotic), I just don't really like silent pictures. I'm impressed by them but I also like dialog. On the other hand, I have realized that I can put the DVD player on fast-forward and still get the same movie experience.

Next up, Disc 7 with something! And something else! As well as some third thing! Beware!

PD Project Horror Part 3

Sorry about the late update. I got distracted by Son of Rambow (which is pretty good) and then the It's Alive Show featuring First Spaceship on Venus (which isn't). First Spaceship on Venus came up before in PD Project Sci-Fi Part 8. It doesn't improve with repeat viewings.

Onward to further misery!

Disc 3

Attack of the Giant Leeches

People start disappearing after a local drunk shoots a monster in a swamp.

There actually isn't a snarky description of this film that can top what it's really about. Drunks, yahoos and losers from a backwoods nowhere that, oddly enough has its own wildlife marshal, get seized and eaten by giant leeches. Yes, the monsters look like Glad bags come to life, yes, there's a dry, charmless white guy who doesn't do anything and yet is still the "hero," and yes, there is a point where the "hero" tells them not to destroy the monsters because it'll damage the local ecosystem. In short, this is a Roger Corman film through and through. Woo-hoo!

This was featured as episode 0406 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased as part of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 6.

Beast of Yucca Flats

Tor Johnson is a Russian scientist defecting to the United States only to be attacked by KGB agents the moment his plane lands. He escapes them only to wander onto a nuclear test site where the radiation from a bomb turns him into "The Beast," a rampaging monster that kills indiscriminately.

Yikes. It has been years since I've seen this but just a peek at its Wiki page is enough to remind me not to return to it. Tor Johnson, were you ever in anything good?

This was featured as episode 0912 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be downloaded via the Digital Archive Project or watched on YouTube (in 10 parts).

This is supposedly PD, but I found records at copyright.gov saying it's still under copyright--Registration Number/Date: PA0000385906 / 1988-10-11

The Screaming Skull

A newlywed couple moves into the husband's home where his new wife starts being haunted by his previous wife.

Another Gaslight-type film done a little better than Nightmare Castle even though it doesn't have Barbara Steele. Ultimately kind of weird and boring, it's most notable for the promise of the trailer: if you die while watching the film, the producers will pay for your funeral. If I get cancer, this film's going on a loop just to spite those bastards!

This was featured as episode 0621 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be downloaded via the Digital Archive Project or watched on YouTube (in 12 parts).

Revolt of the Zombies

An ancient Cambodian method of hypnotism, a man stymied in both love and career, an army of zombies bent to the whim of a mind gone mad with jealousy and betrayal.

The movie is about a man abusing zombie powder for his own ends (as though you'd use it for anything else. "It's a floor wax!" "It's a dessert topping!"), but it takes forever to get there. The first half of the movie is spent establishing the man's devolution from a moral man to a madman intent on power. In other words, filler. The ending is an absolute cop-out, even after being foreshadowed. The movie enters so-bad-its-good territory with the rear-projection journey downriver though. That's worth the price of admission alone.

But I love the unintended messages of these films. Actual quotes: "It may mean the destruction of the white race!" "When dealing with these Orientals, you deal with fatalists. Death to them is a transition to a better life." There's this constant repetition within colonial narratives of "the end of civilization!" "the very survival of our race!" "a threat to our very way of life!" The unimaginable threat of "the other"--always cast as an utterly alien other--such that the use of machines of war and atrocities against them is justified. It must be, because otherwise the invaders, us, are patently bullies, monsters and fiends.

Fun with remixing: the ghostly eyes that appear throughout the film when the zombie power is being utilized are Bela Lugosi's from the film White Zombie, mentioned earlier.

The Terror

An officer from the French Army gets lost and follows a girl to a strange castle where he finds himself in the middle of a revenge plot from beyond the grave.

Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson in a Roger Corman film with additional direction by Francis Ford Coppola. S'alright I guess. It's a neat enough story with a twist I didn't expect, but man is it plodding.

Next time, Disc 4: 2 more Misties, 2 George Zucco films (one with 2 George Zuccos) and Boris Karloff. It... kills four or so hours.

PD Project Horror Part 2

Disc 2

Four movies, each one starring Bela Lugosi because Bela Lugosi equals horror, even when it doesn't.

Black Dragons

On the eve of war, major American industrialists are being murdered one by one. What's their connection to this mysterious stranger who's arrived in town and why is a Japanese dagger left with each body?

More of a revenge/mystery story than a horror movie, Bela of course plays the visiting stranger. The film has an odd logic that spills over into the pacing and the logic of the film. The conclusion arrives almost in spite of itself.

The Invisible Ghost

Bela Lugosi plays a man driven mad by the death of his wife, only she's not dead and there are strange murders occurring in his house.

It's clear, early on, that Bela's the killer. What makes the movie interesting is an innocent man gets the blame, and the chair, for it. Kind of a weird piece.

One Body Too Many

An insurance salesman is hired to guard the body of a man so his potential heirs don't try to bury it and invalidate the man's will.

This isn't horror and Bela isn't even the star of this one. He plays the butler (a funny, seemingly murderous butler, but still, just a butler). The star is actually Jack Haley (the Tin Man) who plays a bumbling insurance agent. It's a simple enough murder/comedy without much mystery. The villain just steps out from the shadows at the end and announces their guilt while trying to kill one more person. But Haley, Bela and the rest are entertaining enough. It's a fun little flick, just absurd to include it in a "horror" box set.

White Zombie

Bela Lugosi plays the evil Murder Legendre, a witch doctor who uses zombie slaves to run his sugar plantation. He's asked by a fellow islander to turn a woman into a zombie so she can be stolen away from her fiancé, only the deal has a higher cost than he could have imagined.

The first zombie movie (no kidding) and kind of neat. The film indicates Lugosi commanding the zombies by doing a close-up of just his eyes, a bit of film that was then re-used in another Halperin picture, Revolt of the Zombies (which is featured on the next disc). There's a priest in this movie who sort of appears out of nowhere. It's a little strange. In fact, there's a lot strange to this film. Lugosi took the role after doing Dracula and turning down, I think, Frankenstein. He was hoping Murder would become another staple character so he could play him in sequel after sequel. Things didn't work out that way.

Saturday, Disc 3 featuring Tor Johnson, 3 movies that were on MST3K and Roger Corman directing Jack Nicholson!

Friday Double Feature: Doomsday and Boy Eats Girl

Doomsday – 4.5/10 as a film, -5/10 for homophobia

On April 3rd (this year!), a virus breaks out in Scotland killing people at an incredible rate. The only solution the UK government has is to seal off Scotland and leave the people to die. 27 years later, England is suffering from massive unemployment and overcrowding and now the virus is breaking out in London. However human life has been spotted in quarantined Scotland. A special team is dispatched to go into the forbidden zone and return with a cure for the disease. Only the survivors don't feel like sharing.
Our heroine, Eden Sinclair, was air-lifted out of Scotland just as the gates are closing, but not before her eye was shot out by a panicked soldier. Now she's a star police officer with a tendency towards recklessness, but always records compromising moments with her removable bionic eye. She takes her crew into the forbidden zone where they've been told people have been reduced to eating each other. So the first thing that happens when they enter the zone is they run over a cow. When they stop to look, they find themselves surrounded by cows. Because with no one around to butcher them, their breeding was unchecked so Scotland now has fields filled with slow, dumb, unsuspecting cows that don't know enough to fear humans.
Which raises the question, why were people eating each other? If there were enough cows left to form a breeding population, you'd think person pate would have been a far-distant plan b. But that's the logic of the film. It's built on the premise of “Wouldn't it be cool if...” Normally I like those movies. They have a goofy, unrestrained charm. Plus, when creative people go balls-out after an idea, they usually create something notable. Not necessarily good, but the piece will have at least one moment that'll make you sit up and take notice. Doomsday doesn't have any moment like that primarily because the people making it aren't creative. Instead of a weird new vision of a post-apocalyptic world that grew up parallel to our own world (how about isolated towns with satellite discs and diesel generators keeping tabs on history's response to their situation?), we get a tired Mad-Max-esque personality cult fighting a group that's taken over an abandoned castle and returned to a medieval lifestyle. Strictly medieval by the way. No hint of steam-punk pretensions here. No attempts to ape modern life with old technology nor any attempt to streamline and improve old technology with modern knowledge either. It's like the heroes fell back in time and then got to use guns and karate against knights. Brilliant.
But maybe you're sensing a certain campy charm to it all. I'm sorry to disappoint, but even attempts to enjoy the film's absurdities are thwarted by the writer/director's uncanny melding of incoherence and incompetence. One example that illustrates the problem throughout: the leader of the cannibal cult takes the stage to address his followers. Loud, poppy music is playing and two pole-dancers are doing their thing. Then the music shifts to the can-can and a kickline of rotund, bearded Scots come out and start doing the can-can (or would it be a bear-bear?). At least, I think they do. It sounds like a funny idea, like a moment where the movie's taking the piss out of itself and maybe even mucking about with the objectification of the pole-dancers (whose various body parts are constantly cut to, but never the whole person herself). But it doesn't actually show you the kickline. It's just cut-cut-cut-ass-cut-cut-pout-cut-cut crowd goes wild. The director has made this thing that must be seen, that only exists to be seen, that is purely a visual gag, and doesn't show you it. And this happens throughout the movie. Fight scenes so aggressively edited that they look like they were spliced by a blender. You see people get hit, but you don't know how, by who or even who took the hit. There's a car chase sequence (right after the lovingly-crafted shots of the car itself, as though there's a car ad in the midst of the movie) where you almost never see the cars hit. The BMW (and they're careful to make sure you know it's a beemer) side-swipes a car, but the evidence of the collision vanishes quickly enough. In fact, even though the BMW is rammed repeatedly, you never see an actual hit. I guess it was a rental.
And on and on. People with no imagination imagining what would be cool. Slightly worse than staring at a blank wall for an equal period of time because you can't help but think they could have done something cool and simply chose not to.
Because they included homophobia. Which I have to note, would be remiss for not pointing out. The movie has a gimp. The movie has a gimp. Guy in a full-body leathersuit kept on a leash. He's supposed to be gay. It's never said he's gay, but he's marked out as sexually “other” and that means gay. Now the gimp isn't problematic on its own. He's introduced after the lead's been captured by the cannibal leader who has her tied up and beats her. The gimp, in that context, becomes an illustration of the devolution of sexuality and humanity in the forbidden zone--he's not depraved, his entire environment is. Later though, when the gimp resurfaces, he's tied, limbs spread, to the front of a truck during the chase scene. Again, just another part of a world that's slipped free of its moorings. However, one of the good guys takes a moment to shout, “You like pain? Then you'll love this,” before side-swiping the gimp's car and sending it into another crashed vehicle where you see the gimp get smashed before bursting into flame. And you see it all clearly. Everything else in the movie is cut too closely for you to see anything, but this they luxuriate over. And the guys in the audience behind me cheered. The only other time they reacted during the movie was when the car was unveiled (they “oohed” and “ahhed” so maybe my distaste at the obvious product placement means I'm just not part of the target demo). They knew what they just saw: the fag got his. And I know, “You're being too sensitive, you're reading too much into it.” No. You see it clearly unlike everything else in the movie and it's the only time a zinger is used during the chase scene. The movie thought this was okay. Remember, the good guys are fighting cannibals. How much “other” can you get? Yet that's not “other” enough. To qualify for special attention, to be notably deserving of death, the person had to be marked out as sexually “other.” That made it okay and that ideology, that logic that says some people are deserving of death and others aren't, that there are lower breeds that can be destroyed, is inherently evil. Remember, the guys behind me thought this was cool. It's not cool.

Boy Eats Girl – 8.5/10

I rented this movie for several reasons: I've been wanting to for a while, I wanted to have a Friday double feature to post about, and I wanted something to wash the taste of Doomsday out of my mouth. So I went for the horror/comedy zombie picture. There are only two things I'm a big sucker for in movies: werewolves and zombies. And this is a zombie pic with trailers for two really awful-looking werewolf films! Score! Plus it's an Irish film.
Did I say there are only two things I'm a big sucker for?
An Irish zombie horror comedy. I think I just wet my pants.
Nathan is in love with his long-time friend Jessica, but fate (aka Jessica's father) conspires against them meeting the night he plans to tell her how he feels. In a truly spectacular depression, he empties a bottle of whiskey, considers hanging himself... and through a bizarre but not untenable series of events sets off a zombie plague.
Despite the zombies, the movie's about teen angst and it portrays it well. The kids are all snarky, sex-obsessed and generally overreacting to everything around them, which is about how I remember high school too. The movie shines in the details. It gets the way kids lie about sex to each other and assault each others' reputations. It also avoids easy dichotomies. Yes, there are kids who are bullies and villains and they die horrible deaths. But there are also kids who are absolutely unsympathetic, they're archetypes, there to be hated and then die, and the movie breathes life into them, makes them somewhat sympathetic so that you're actually a little crushed when they bite it.
The zombie make-up is okay. Fast zombies, but since they're moved by a voodoo curse and freshly dead, that's not very annoying. The movie is very Irish—Catholic Church, snakes, music by Snow Patrol—but it's those particularities that make it charming. This movie was like eighty minutes of happy for me, I don't know what else to say about it.

I'd See That Movie