I'm running a couple of days behind this week, it's double bills all the way 'til Thursday for me...
Critters (1986)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090887/This hackneyed horror/sci-fi/comedy is a pastiche of half a dozen better movies, from E.T to Invaders From Mars, It Came From Outer Space and of course, Gremlins. A group of small, fuzzy and extremely hostile alien invaders known as the Crites turn up in the Brown family's backyard, pursued by a duo of intergalactic bounty hunters, their subsequent battles wreaking havoc on a whole rural community.
The thing is, the Critters themselves are a bit shit. Yeah, they've got big teeth and can shoot poison spine-darts, but they're only strong in numbers, fairly useless on their own. They don't walk around so much as roll and these goofy rolling scenes were about as good as the film got, with much of the comedy falling flat. The E.T. references are the most prevalent, Dee Wallace (the mom from E.T.) plays Mrs. Brown and at one stage a Critter bites the head off an E.T. doll, hammering its point home. Fuck knows how they got four sequels out of this, Siskel & Ebert must have had both thumbs up their their arses when they scored it such a positive review. Watchable, but only just.
The Gate (1987)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093075/This is the kind of film that would have scared me shitless if I'd caught it on TV at a more impressionable age. A bunch of kids fight a horde of pint-sized demons after they discover a gate leading to another dimension through a hole in their back garden. It's like the most terrifying episode of Goosebumps ever but it's hard to know which audience the film makers intended it for, it's too damn scary for kids, but far too tame for horror fans. The SFX are decent, the demons are all stop-motion animated and the compositing is especially impressive. The performances are passable I suppose, but the plot is pretty humdrum and by the end gets more than a little tiresome. Watch it for the effects, but don't go in expecting much.
Carnival of Souls (1962)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055830/An independent horror-mystery by actor-turned-director/producer Herk Harvey, featuring without a doubt, the most abrupt opening to a film I've ever seen. Candice Hilligoss plays Mary Henry, a head strong woman who, after surviving a car crash, moves to a new town to take up a job as a church organist. Except something isn't right, weird things start happening to Mary. It begins as she's on the road, driving by an abandoned pavilion on the great salt lake, minding her own business, from out of nowhere THE MAN (played by director Harvey) appears at the car window causing her to veer off the highway, and me to almost crap myself.
The scares aren't cattle-prod, with loud noises piercing deliberate silence, they're much more subtle and as a result, far more effective. Much of the film sees Mary trying unsuccessfully to adjust to her new surroundings in the wake of the accident, she moves to a boarding house, but is relentlessly pursued by leering neighboring lodger John Linden (played with sleazy zeal by Sidney Berger), she begins her new job as Church Organist, but manages to weird out the Minister when she falls into a trance and shifts from church hymn to eerie carnival themes.
The film has a fantastically creepy atmosphere and it's mainly due to its sound design and organ-based score. At one point, Mary's browsing through a dress shop, when all of a sudden the sound drops out. We know something's not right, our suspicions confirmed when she attempts to talk to a shop assistant, Mary's become invisible to all around her, and runs from the store in a panic. It's a terrifying device, one that's been used dozens of times since, but there's certain satisfaction about seeing where it originated from. I won't say much more, Carnival of Souls is definitely recommended viewing, if only to see how influential its effects have been on subsequent horror films.
When A Stranger Calls (1979)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080130/We've all heard that ghost story and seen countless slashers derived from it, the one about the babysitter and the man upstairs. Here, director Fred Walton delivers a far subtler psychological horror based on that legend than Carpenter's Halloween, released the previous year, the success of which directly inspired Walton to adapt a short into this feature. Jill Johnson (played by the wide-eyed Carol Kane) is the baby-sitter who's minding the children at the house of the Mandrakis family when she receives a series of menacing phone calls, "Have you checked the children?"
The man upstairs is Curt Duncan, brilliantly played to disturbing effect by Tony Beckley. You see, in this film we know who the killer is. And we know that he was hiding upstairs the whole time, having murdered the two kids, we don't witness it thankfully, but the verbal description is horrifying enough. "The coroner told him there had been no murder weapon. The killer had used only his hands." After the initial murders, the story cuts ahead 7 years, Duncan has escaped from the mental asylum and its up to former-police-investigator-turned-private-detective John Clifford (played by the always brilliant Charles Durning) to track him down.
I watched a blu-ray copy of this and I'm very glad I did, as both the lighting and cinematography are among the best in a film of this type and era. The sound and music too are quite subtle, but used well and add to the film's ominous tone. This isn't a slasher where you're routing for the killer to take out as many douche-bags as possible, but a suspenseful man hunt akin to Fritz Lang's M, Duncan is a mad dog and needs to be put down. The story ends up full circle, with former baby-sitter Jill now a married mother of two herself, out for dinner with her husband when she's contacted by Detective Clifford. The ending is handled particularly well with a shock I really didn't see coming. Recommended.
The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061655/Impeccable production design in this, the 4th feature from Polanski, which is a good thing too, because the story is told mostly through the visuals. The plot, seemingly based (very) loosely on the Bram Stoker classic, sees doddering Prof. Abronsius (played to perfection by Jack MacGowran) accompanied by his bumbling and sexually inexperienced assistant Alfred (played well by Polanski himself) as they travel to Transylvania seeking their prey. The film is a horror-lite comedy farce, but makes for compulsive viewing due to the lavish scale of the production, inventive camera tricks and the onscreen/offscreen romance blossoming between Polanski and Sharon Tate. She is fucking gorgeous in this.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095444/This bizarre clown-themed horror comedy throws all sorts of crazy props and inventive death scenes into the mix: Mummified corpses wrapped in cocoons of pink cotton candy, flying saucers that resemble circus tents, killer popcorn, murderous shadow puppets and malicious balloon animals. Best of all is grumpy, cynical, hard-drinking police Sherrif Curtis Mooney played by John Vernon (Dean Vernon Wormer from Animal House) who's life ends in an exceptionally creative way. The makeup effects of the clowns are excellent and the soundtrack is thoroughly rocking.
Troll Hunter (2010)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1740707/Meh. I was wondering what I wasn't getting as I sat through this found footage flick last night, after reading a couple of reviews on IMDb I now understand. I think you really have to be pretty familiar with Norwegian culture to get the most out this one, and despite sharing a house with a Norwegian man for 4 years, it still passed over me.
The plot goes like this: bears have been turning up dead in the Norwegian countryside, 3 film students decide to pursue a suspect poacher, only to discover that he is in fact, the titular troll hunter. Trolls really do exist, the government has been keeping it a secret and they do this by hiring hunters to keep them in check. Trolls to me are "Who's that clip-clapping over my bridge?" Three Billy Goats, JRR Tolkien and assholes on the internet, but they have a far deeper significance in Norwegian folk culture it seems. This isn't to say the film is bad, it's just culture-specific, and I admire that. I mean, who the hell else is going to get much out of The Guard, Grabbers or anything by The Rubber Bandits besides us. The most enjoyable part of the film for me was the effects, while I'm usually adverse to most of it, the CGI here is undeniably impressive, especially for a non-Hollywood film with a relatively low budget of $3.5 million.
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