Girl in a Cage

31 Days of Halloween, Day 8

Yeah, I missed a day. So sue me.

Ahem. Not all marriages end happily. I had one that began thirteen years ago today and ended just over nine years later with the death of my wife. So, naturally, this morning I found myself in the mood for another tale of tragedy--Zombie Honeymoon, which I recorded during the two days when I had free Showtime.

This movie was just fantastic. The acting and the script were just light years ahead of most horror movies. It baffles me that this was a straight-to-cable production. The megaplexes are littered with torture porn movies (oh goody--Saw IV is about to come out), and a quality horror movie like this is relegated to the second-tier pay cable channel. Where's the justice?

Anyway, what this movie is really about is how things change after marriage. How you sign up to spend the rest of your life with someone, but because you can't see the future, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into. In an instant, the life you thought you had all mapped out can be wiped out. Like when a flesheating zombie comes out of the sea and vomits in your husband's mouth, for instance!

While Zombie Honeymoon is not a straightforward allegory, it's certainly more than just a gore fest. It's helped in this by the fact that the actors play the whole thing completely straight. This must have been quite a feat--even when hubby comes home gnawing on somebody's severed arm, all you see on the wife's face is stuff that goes through the minds of real people in real situations: what's happened to the man I thought I knew? How can I stay in this relationship? How can I leave?

In the end, the wife comes across as slightly more heroic than idiotic for sticking with her zombie spouse. Fine performances, fine script, and hardly anybody's ever heard of it! I mean, I kind of follow zombie-related material, and I had no idea this 3-year-old movie existed. Just about the only complaint I had is that given the hotness of the lead actress and the word "honeymoon" in the title, there was probably room for a lot more gratuitous nudity than was actually present. Overall, though, I really liked and was impressed by this. The writer/director seemed to understand that horror is just a way we deal with what's really horrifying, which is real life.

31 Days of Halloween, Day 6

I've written before about the genius of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and I may have implied that Rob Zombie should be paying Tobe Hooper royalties for how badly he ripped it off in House of 1000 Corpses. (well, and a little bit in the Devil's Rejects too, actually.)

But one thing I've never said about this movie is that, despite the gore and humor, I find it a genuinely horrifying portrait of a descent into madness. Our heroine, a plucky DJ, is abducted by the demented family on view in the fabulous Breakfast Club parody poster
(well, except for the really old guy, who I think is a corpse), and subjected to unimaginable horrors. The only hope is the deranged, Bible-thumping lawman (sound familiar, Devil's Rejects fans?) played by Dennis Hopper at his eye-bulgin', scenery-chewin' best.

Well, so what's a poor plucky horror heroine to do in a world gone mad? Well, in this case, kill to survive and, in the act, go completely insane until, at the end, you're indistinguishable from the nuts who abducted you in the first place.

It just seems like a far more interesting angle than most horror movies take, and a far more honest take on horrific violence than almost any other movie. I mean, really, you can't do horrific things and not be transformed by it in some way.

Anyway, so hats off to Tobe Hooper and all involved in this funny, gore-filled, surprisingly thought provoking splatter fest.

31 Days of Halloween, Day 5: Set Tivos To Stun!

Many miles from where I'm now sitting, something is crawling to the surface of a dark Scottish Loch...yes, Synchronicity is breaking out all over the place. In order to accompany my post here about Roky Erikson's "I Walked With a Zombie," I was planning to write about the movie of the same name here.

And what should I find when I'm searching for a movie to watch with the kids tonight (I'm thinking about Cry Baby, though I've got Clueless recording as a backup), but a Val Lewton double feature tonight, Friday October 5th at 9:45 on TCM! They start off with the classic masterpiece (no, really. It's one of the best movies ever) Cat People (no, not the piece of crap with Nastassia Kinski where John Heard's arm gets ripped off. The other one!). I wrote about its awesomeness here. Yeah, I'm linkin' to myself, bitches!

Ahem. Anyway, my DVD box informs me that I Walked With a Zombie is actually a horrific adaptation of Jane Eyre. I wouldn't know because I slogged my butt through Wuthering Heights and had all the Bronte-induced tedium I could stand. What I do know is that this is a genuinely creepy little tale of love and death. Atmospheric is usually a synonym for boring, but here I think it actually works. The whole thing just exudes creepiness. And this is not a George Romero style zombie movie. It's more about the horror of one person joining the walking dead than the dead overrunning the earth. And for a movie from the 40's where white people encounter voodoo, it's actually less racist than you might expect.

If, for some reason, you don't own the DVDs yet, do yourself a favor and tivo two black and white horror classix tonight. And thank me tomorrow. Or whenever you get around to watching them. I know how those episodes of Grey's Anatomy pile up. Actually I don't. For us it's the episodes of Drake and Josh that pile up. But I digress.

31 Days of Halloween Day 4

Great horror novels are few and far between, but there are many great horror short stories. I don't know what it is, but there's just something about horror--it seems to work best in the short form. Any great short story is a wonderful experience, because you can get a real jolt of literature without committing to a novel, but a horror short story is especially good because the author can really kick you in the teeth, and you'll thank them for it, whereas if they try to kick you in the teeth at the end of a novel, it pisses you off. This is what bugged me about The Ruins--it's basically a novel-length version of, say, Stephen King's "The Raft," but who wants to spend 500 pages on that?

Anyway, Today's pick is a completely kickass short story from China Mieville's amazing short story collection, Looking For Jake. (It's Co-written with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer)(I guess. I mean, they are credited. Emma Bircham appears to be the film critic for the Socialist Review--hoo boy, not, I'm guessing, the person you want to take to a screening of say, Humanoids from the Deep or Gator Bait--and there's no telling who this Max Schaefer is. Video game developer? Grad student in Taiwan? In any case, I'm guessing Mieville did most of the heavy lifting on this one.)

Now, Mieville is known mostly as a purveyor of, um, urban fantasy, or dark fantasy, or dark urban steampunk fantasy, or something, but this is a straight-up horror story. It's called "The Ball Room," and it's the story, told from the perspective of a security guard, of very evil, scary goings-on in a ball room play area at a big store that is most certainly not Ikea. I think this one might be especially horrifying if you're a parent, but not in a cheap, kids-in-danger-like-the-kid-in-Saw way. It's just horrifying. You can get it in Mieville's Looking for Jake, or in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 19th annual edition, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant.

31 Days of Halloween Day 3

For those of us who enjoy horror movies, watching them is often akin to panning for gold in a stream of excrement. It's hardly worth the trouble, and yet you keep sitting through dreck like Deadly Friend just so you can catch the exploding head basketball gag.

Such was the case the other night, when I caught Humanoids From the Deep, a 1980 classic I recorded off IFC. Now, let me say at the outset that this movie is just a horrible piece of crap. Most of the first half of the movie consists of tedious debates about whether the small fishing town is going to get a new fish cannery or not. None of this ever pays off later in the movie. It seems that the creators of this movie had a really cool sequence and they had to struggle to find 70 more minutes of movie to put around it.

So we had a few nice humanoid from the deep attacks in the beginning of the movie, in which the humanoids were properly hidden from view, and these were okay, but I was just about to write this movie off as a complete waste of time when the whole thing came to life in the climactic carnival scene. Humanoids from the deep kill and destroy at an oceanside carnival! It's actually a pretty effective scene--for one thing, the screaming doesn't ever seem to stop, which is probably what would actually happen if a carnival were attacked by humanoids from the deep, and I think the filmmakers did a great job of creating a scene that feels genuinely chaotic. Also, the humanoids look less crappy than you might expect in a low-budget gem like this.

Of course, the explanation of why the humanoids attack makes no sense, and it's not clear whether they've all been killed at the end, and the abrupt ending both rips off Alien and probably inspired David Cronenberg's The Fly. Oh yeah, and apparently the humanoids are driven to mate with human women so as to speed up their already high-speed evolution (apparently they're mutated coelecanths), and apparently mutated coelecanths like the sight of topless babes as much as the average horror fan, because they do a lot of ripping off of the bikini tops.

Yeah, okay, this movie sucks, but I guess that's what made the ten minutes when it wasn't sucking that much more remarkable. Here's a clip from the carnival scene--it features lots of awesome simulated gore (including a decaptitation that IFC didn't show. Real Movies, Uncut, my ass!) as well as some behind-the-shower-curtain nudity, so file under Not Safe For Work.

31 Days of Halloween: Day 2

Travel back with me to the mid-1980's. A vampire movie is released with an MTV sensibility. It stars the young scion of the Sutherland acting dynasty, Some Guy Who Looks Like Rob Lowe, and, of course, the Coreys. It is a huge hit despite being kind of crappy. (Edward Herrmann, it should be pointed out, did his usual fine work in this movie. The guy just doesn't know how to give a bad performance.)

In the shadow of this big hit, a big flop based on a similar premise (naive teen hooks up with group of vampires) is released. It stars Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen, and is a big artistic success in the hit (Strange Days, Blue Steel) and miss (Point Break) oevre of director Kathryn Bigelow. It's called Near Dark.

While The Lost Boys is more stylish than scary, Near Dark is actually quite menacing. I guess that's not surprising--Lance Henriksen is way scarier than Kiefer Sutherland. (Unless you're an enemy of America--then watch out, 'Cause Jack Bauer is comin' to torture you!). Yes, there are some plot holes you could drive a stake through (vampirism can be cured by a blood transfusion! Why hasn't anybody thought to try that before?), but there are also a couple of sequences that stick with me decades after my last viewing of this movie. One is when the vampires invade an isolated redneck bar--it's this genius sequence full of suspense, menace and gore that's simply brilliant. Also, Our Hero won't kill to survive when he's turned into a vampire, so there are several scenes of him on his knees drinking blood from the arm of the vampire hottie who transformed him that, shall we say, made a heck of an impression on my 18-year-old self.

It's available on DVD, it's creepy as hell, and it's one of those movies that leaves you going, "Damn! That rocked!"

Thirty-One Days of Halloween, Day One.

Well, whatever that no-talent anti-Semite TS Eliot said, for me October is the cruelest month, being the anniversary month of the worst day of my life. So in a probably fruitless attempt to stave off the October blues, I'm gonna spend this month celebrating the weird, the demented, and the horrifying--all the stuff that accompanies my favorite holiday, Halloween.

The walking dead, the severed heads, the buckets o' blood--it all brings me joy. This is because I am a bit sick and twisted, of course, but also it's because horror is, as I've probably said, the only genre that consistently tells the truth about life: sometimes awful things happen unexpectedly without explanation; some people survive, some people don't. And yeah, you can see that in a doleful movie like, say, Before and After and walk out ready to cry, or you can see it in a kick-ass festival of gore like, say, Dawn of the Dead (1978, if you please), and walk out grinning.

I guess for me, art should not just reflect reality; it should transform it into something more interesting, something more fun, something that allows us to see reality from a different perspective. And yeah, it should, if possible, have flesheating ghouls.

So, anyway, day one of my 31 days of Halloween begins in seventh grade. Yes, middle school is a house of horrors, but I'm actually talking about a comic book I purchased at the beginning of the seventh grade: Mystery in Space #112.
Now, I've read tons of horror comics in my day--Weird War was a particular favorite, but I also had Marvel's Aargh! #2 and re-read that for years, and I picked up the odd copy of House of Secrets or the other DC horror comic whose name escapes me right now, and this one is probably the only story I can remember that really sticks with me.

From what I remember, "Howl," which appeared in this issue, is a story that owes a fair amount to Alien--the crew of a starship picks up the stranded survivor of an apparent starship disaster, and she turns out to be a (foxy) vampire who dispatches the crew one by one, until she's finally alone in her moment of triumph aboard another empty starship...except she didn't know that the ship is made of silver! Somehow the ship's construction means that the (foxy) vampire will not be able to roam the galaxy in search of fresh victims. Instead, she'll be entombed forever in a silver casket floating through space! Ha! The titular Howl is the (foxy) vampire's howl of existential horror as she realizes she's unintentionally booked herself into an eternity of solitary confinement and starvation without the relief of death.

It's quality stuff, and though I no longer own it, it's my pick for day one of the thirty-one days of Halloween.