Lucid Dreams and Saturn Skies The Life and Writing of Andrew Kincaid

Tag Archives: Horror Movies

Horror movies are a genre of film designed to elicit feelings of fear and anxiety from the audience. Often supernatural or macabre themes are used, and very often gruesome scenes are designed to elicit disgust in the audience. These films prey on primal fears.

Thirty Years Later, and Nobody Learned Not to Open the Necronomicon: A Review of Evil Dead (2013)

April 9, 2013 11:24 am / 2 Comments /
Evil Dead poster, from IMDB.com. You can see the hype =P

Evil Dead poster, from IMDB.com. You can see the hype =P

I will admit it — the red band trailer has had me excited for Evil Dead for months now. Now, normally I don’t get excited about much of anything, especially a modern horror flick and ESPECIALLY a remake. but my normal guardedness fell away for some reason with Evil Dead. I really like the original trilogy (I own all three), and frankly I haven’t seen a decent horror flick in the theater for a long time.

And that was what Evil Dead shaped up to be — a decent horror flick. It really doesn’t live up to the legacy of the original Evil Dead, but that’s how it is with remakes most of the time. It was a pretty solid movie, I thought. It was very well shot, and the sound effects were done very well. It had some downright creepy scenes, and I thought it did a good job ratcheting up the tension overall.

However, despite its technical proficiency, there was something missing. Despite having a bigger budget, better special effects, and the benefit of modern film technology, it wasn’t as creepy or fun as the original. Some of it had to do with the protagonist, and the fact that he was as dense as granite. Word to the wise: when people are carving their face off with broken glass, it probably isn’t because of a virus, especially if your hippie-looking (stupidly) read from a mysterious, flesh bound book only a couple hours ago. Some of it had to do with the contrived nature of the set up — for example, I’m certified to teach high school, but nowhere in the process did they teach me to read ancient Sumerian.
Not that I would read it to myself, out loud, when the book CLEARLY SAYS NOT TO!

See, that’s what bothered me the most, I think. The original is 32 years old and shot on a quarter million dollar budget, yet the writing is tighter and it is overall a much creepier movie. I mean, look at how they got around the pretty ridiculous scene I mentioned above — in the original, they find the Necronomicon in the basement beside a recorder containing the notes of an archeologist who is studying it. They play a section of the recorder where the archeologist reads an incantation from the book out loud, and thus accidentally summon the demons that torment them that night. Much more elegant, and it has a creep-factor bonus, since a fairly innocuous action brought about horrific consequences.

It isn’t really fair to compare a remake to the original. On the other hand, Evil Dead has been remade before — Evil Dead 2 was basically a remake, despite being billed as a sequel, and many regard it as better than the original. So perhaps it is a fair comparison. Don’t get the wrong impression though — I did like the Evil Dead remake. It was gory, creepy, and generally fun to watch in a theater full of squawking teenagers. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the original.

Posted in: Movie Reviews, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Good, the Bad, and the Awesomely Bad

January 22, 2013 10:11 am / 7 Comments /
Proof that a B-movie isn't necessarily a bad movie.

Proof that a B-movie isn’t necessarily a bad movie.

Last night (I’m writing this on Sunday–yay for working ahead!) I watched a movie that was so indescribably bad that there are no words.  It was so tremendously awful, I’m pretty sure I felt reality warp in the face of its complete craptitude.  It is bad on a metaphysical level.  The movie was Birdemic: Shock and Terror, and it was awesome.

Now the love of really, really bad movies is a peculiar thing to people not initiated into the ranks.  So let me try to explain what exactly “Awesomely Bad” movies are and why I love them so much.  Now a lot of this is subjective of course–what I think is good or bad and what you think is good or bad differ widely according to taste.  But there are some generalizations you can make.  First, you have Good movies.  They’re generally well constructed, tell a coherent story, and provide some kind of meaning.  Lincoln, which came out a few months ago, is generally considered a “good” movie.  Then there are Bad movies, which are, well, bad.  Poorly constructed, nonsensical story, and generally leave you feeling like you wasted an hour and a half you’ll never get back.  Battlefield: Earth was generally panned for being a bad movie, by way of example.  (Note:  B-movies aren’t necessarily bad.  The designation more refers to the budget and talent involved than the quality of the movie itself.  That being said, oftentimes B-movies fall into the Bad or Awesomely Bad category).

Then you have the Awesomely Bad movie.  These movies are usually objectively bad.  They’re usually poorly constructed, made on little to no budget, and feature acting talent your local community theater wouldn’t even  hire to mop its floors.  Generally, they’re horror movies.  Something about the horror genre lends itself to producing spectacularly bad movies (probably because horror and comedy are kissing cousins).  But Awesomely Bad movies have a little something else that push them into an almost transcendental status, that warps the “good/bad continuum” rather like how a large object (or in this case a giant steaming pile of crap) warps the space/time continuum.

What is that little something?  It is hard to classify.  It goes well beyond goofy dialog, horrible acting, and terrible story telling.  It is something more than having a really goofy looking monster (although that helps).  It seems to me that what makes the difference between Bad and Awesomely Bad is the attitude of the director and the cast.  Awesomely Bad movies are done completely in earnest.  The directors have a story they want to tell, and a message they want to send.  They BELIEVE in what they are doing.  The problem is that they are just simply awful at it, and what they thought was amazing turns out to be just that, in an entirely different way than they intended.

Hopefully that all  makes some sort of sense.  It’s something that has to be experienced to be believed.  So go to Netflix (finding awful movies is so much easier now thanks to Netflix!) and load Troll 2 or Birdemic: Shock and Terror on your Instant Queue.  Invite friends over, and make an evening of it.  You can all sit in awe together of how tremendously bad, yet awesome a movie can be.

Posted in: Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Space Roar–The Primordial Sound?

December 14, 2012 8:56 am / 2 Comments /

I’ve been AWOL this week from the ole blog as I’ve been busy wrangling fourth graders.  When I wasn’t doing that, I was home nursing what appears to be the beginning of another allergy attack/bout of sinusitis.  As part of the self improvement program I’ve initiated, I resolved to not kill myself for my hobbies.  So I haven’t done  much writing to speak of this week.  Then I remembered I had some entries done ahead of time for just such an occasion.  Better late than never right?  We should be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week, hopefully!

Looking up into the night sky is quite relaxing.  Seeing the pinpoints of distant stars against the navy blue backdrop of the night sky is a source of solace for some and inspiration for others.  Ever since humans began to walk upright, and maybe even before that, we have looked to the skies and wondered what lay in the boundless heavens.

Only in the last hundred years or so has our technology become powerful enough to let us peer into Nature’s innermost secrets.  And the more we learn, the stranger things get.  For example, here are a whole subset of bizarre, unexplained sounds out there.  So far I’ve covered one of the most famous on the blog, the Bloop.  But while the Bloop was massive, it is nothing more than a drop in the bucket compared to the Space Roar.

Back in 2009, a NASA team trying to find traces of heat from primordial stars on the far edges of the universe launched  an Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emissions (ARCADE).  They were looking for radio transmissions from the oldest stars in the universe.  As for why they were looking for radio waves, that is because they are electromagnetic waves.  Essentially, radio waves are light.  As light travels, its wave length stretches out and its frequency becomes slower.  So, what started as, say, infrared energy (heat) 13.7 billion years ago might have stretched out to become a 10cm radio wave by the time it reached Earth.

Now, as you might imagine the researchers were not expecting anything more than faint signals from so far away.  Imagine there surprise when they turned in the radiometer and heard a hiss six times louder than anything they expected.  No one knows the source–no known cosmic radio sources can come close to accounting for the Space Roar.  The only thing that comes close are so-called radio galaxies, and even they are not nearly powerful enough.  The roar drowns out any signals from the primordial stars the team was originally trying to study.  As science collectively scratches its head and plunges into the data to try and figure out what this thing is, we can only speculate about what mysterious forces are sending their roar through the void of space.

Posted in: Our Weird World, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Life in a Small Town Isn’t Always What It Seems. Or Is It? (It Isn’t).

July 6, 2012 4:55 pm / 3 Comments /

There are two conflicting pop culture cliches concerning life in a small town.  One is the idyllic, Norman Rockwell portrayal, where a small town is portrayed as something like a little slice of heaven on Earth.  This is the stereotypical, baseball and apple pie American ideal that most small towns aspire to with varying degrees of success.  And then on the opposite pole there is the portrayal of small towns favored by Stephen King and other horror authors since time immemorial–the Norman Rockwell-gone-wrong where on the surface everything seems fine but like a white washed tomb the pleasant exterior conceals corruption.

Having lived in a small town my entire life, I’m in a position where I can judge the truth of both these extremes.  Both are true, to a certain extent.  There are wonderful people in small towns, people who will do anything for you and who still live by the Golden Rule.  The down-home feel and old fashioned spirit are both still alive and well in America’s small towns (at least the ones I’ve been in).  Where I live, it’s safe to go out at night and a lot of people still leave their doors unlocked (I don’t, but that’s because I have anxiety problems and a lot of portable electronics).

However, that is not the whole story.  Horror is a popular genre not because it talks about terrible things that can never happen, but because it helps us to deal with the terrible things that do happen in a safe way.  The horrors of the world are not far away in a small town, no matter how friendly or safe it might be.

Certainly, there may not be as much crime and violence in rural areas as in a bigger city, but while the frequency of such events might be lower they are often more horrific simply because they happen in smaller, close knit areas, where everyone knows everyone.  I can think of several terrible things that have occurred around my area, senseless and bizarre crimes that still echo in the local memory years, even decades, later.

By way of example, in my own town two local boys in the 90′s went on a killing spree.  The story goes that they killed an old lady in the next town over by crushing her head with a brick.  They killed two more people before finally being caught in Oklahoma.  They’ve since been executed.  When asked why they did what they did, one of them responded that they were bored.  Even creepier, one of them worked at a local grocery store and he carried out for my mom a week before he and his friend went on their spree.  The woman’s body was never found.

I covered another example in a previous post.  Cletus T. Reese killed three men on his farm the next county over, spurred by voices in his head.  He did the deed by braining them with a heavy branch.  His story went on to become the subject of local folklore, which portrayed him as a cunning serial killer rather than a sad, mentally ill man haunted by inner demons who destroyed three lives as a result of his delusions.

So, by way of my own experiences, the Stephen King-esque cliche of the white washed tomb town is very much true.  But then so is the 1950′s Norman Rockwell stereotype.  It’s rather like when you see the ugly side of a person, say when the lose their temper and say something that shouldn’t be said.  Often the response will be, “So now we see who you really are!” (or the like).  Well, no.  And yes.  Really, it can be both at once and neither at the same time.  Kind of like how grey is neither black nor white but a mix of both.

That, in a nut shell, is life in a small town.

 

Posted in: Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Life & Writing, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of the Bunnyman (Based on True Events…Seriously, I Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up)

June 29, 2012 2:17 pm / Leave a Comment /
The Colchester Underpass, better known as Bunnyman Bridge

A photo of the Bunnyman Bridge during daylight. Officially known as the Colchester Overpass, two rail lines run over top of it and the road itself is also fairly busy. Keeping kids away from this place could be part of why the story of the Bunnyman came into existence.

Ask anyone under the age of twenty out in Fairfax County, Virginia if something lurks in the night under the Bunnyman Bridge, and they will tell you most assuredly that something does.  Be he a flesh and blood maniac or a being of a more ghostly variety, the Bunnyman is said to haunt the Colchester Overpass, now better known as Bunnyman Bridge.

The legend began somewhere around 1970, and the information that I have seen claims that it has spawned upwards of fifty-four variants(!).  The most common version of the story goes as follows.  Around 1904, the residents of Clifton, Virginia successfully petitioned to have the local asylum/prison shut down.  Since you can’t just release a bunch of violent crazy folks out into the countryside, the prisoners were to be transported to another facility.  All went well, at least until the transport crashed, killing several of the prisoners and allowing the rest to escape.  All but one of the escapees were rounded up.  Skinned, half eaten rabbit carcasses left hanging from trees and the Colchester Overpass began to appear soon after.  Officials then found the body of Marcus Wallster, left hanging from the Underpass in a similar manner to the rabbits.

Understandably concerned, the police ramped up their efforts to find the madman and soon discovered that the culprit was none other than Douglas A. Grifin, who had been put in the asylum for killing his family on Easter Sunday.  When the climactic confrontation came between the authorities and the madman, Grifin was hit by an oncoming train in an attempt to escape.  Ever since, around Halloween when the veil between our world and the spirit world is thin, locals claim to see rabbit carcasses hanging from the Colchester Overpass.  Some have even claimed to see a figure standing there in the shadows.  Nobody ventures beneath the Underpass to see who it is though because the Bunnyman makes no distinction between rabbits and people–many variants of the legend have our costume-clad friend going Jason Vorhees on curious teenagers who come calling on Halloween Night, leaving their mutilated corpses dangling from the Colchester Overpass like Marcus Wallster so many years before.

Of course, this is all sorts of urban legend-y fun but how much of it is true?  Is this story, like Cropsey, more of a way to scare teens and preteens away from danger?  As you might suspect, the bulk of this story is false.  There never was an insane asylum in Clifton, and county records have no men named Marcus Wallster or Douglas A. Grifin on record as ever having lived.

However, there are some elements of the story which are true.  Namely, there really was a crazy guy dressed in a bunny suit terrorizing (actually more like confusing the hell out of) people in Fairfax County.  Two separate incidents from 1970 report a man dressed in a bunny suit yelling at people he felt were trespassing on his property.  In one incident he tossed a hatchet through a car window, and the other he attempted to chop down a porch post with a long handled axe.  No suspect was ever detained, but in one related incident a man calling himself the “Axe-Man” accused a representative of the Kings Park West Subdivision of dumping trash on his property. To this day no one knows the mysterious costumed man’s identity.

Not coincidentally, after these events in 1970 the Bunnyman story took wing.  It isn’t often in researching folklore and urban legends that you find their origin, but in this case it seems that the truth really was stranger than fiction.

Sources:

Bunny Man–Wikipedia

The Clifton Bunnyman–Castle of Spirits

The Bunnyman Unmasked

Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of Cropsey

June 22, 2012 8:56 pm / 5 Comments /
The poster for The Burning, a horror movie featuring a blade wielding maniac named Cropsey

“A legend of terror is no longer a camp fire story anymore!”– tagline for The Burning, the only movie I’ve seen featuring a crazed killer named Cropsey.

Folks in the Northeast US who attended literally any camp in the past thirty or forty years will probably be familiar with the name Cropsey.  For the rest of us, there is a fascinating documentary on the subject on Netflix called, creatively enough, Cropsey that in large part inspired this post.  Outside of the Northeast, we might know Cropsey better as Jason Vorhees.  That is slightly overstating the case, but let me give you the bare bones version of the story, since there are a dizzying array of variations.

The core of the Cropsey legend involves a man named Cropsey who was a respected member of the local community who lived near the local sleep-away camp.  Campers tried to play a prank on Cropsey’s son that goes horribly wrong.  The prank left Cropsey terribly deformed and seriously pissed, not to mention insane.  As a result, Cropsey took to the woods, axe in hand, where he lay in wait for any unwary campers who happened to wander away from the relative safety of camp.

The parallels with the Friday the 13th franchise and nearly every slasher ever made are pretty clear.  They all involve a blade-happy maniac with a hate-on for campers/coeds/teenagers who break the rules, be they cultural rules (anyone who has premarital sex dies) or the camp rules (if you wander off you get axed).  The way to survive is clear–simply don’t break the rules, and you’ll be fine.

In that way, what started as a regional legend has become a part of pop culture at large, although Cropsey only shows up as a named character in one movie that I know of.  That movie is called The Burning, which is basically a Great Value version of the original Friday the 13th.  It is about a cruel camp caretaker named, you guessed it, Cropsey who is the victim of a prank that gets out of hand, leaving him deformed and very, very angry.  He gets his revenge years later on a group of campers that, oddly enough, contains characters played by Fisher Stevens and Jason Alexander (better known as George Costanza from Seinfield).  In any case, the movie is actually pretty good despite its slow start.  I don’t normally laugh at people getting hacked to bits (it seems in bad taste) but some of the stuff that happens when the bloodbath begins is pretty goofy and I couldn’t help myself.

Now that the legend of Cropsey has entered pop culture, it is much more difficult now to pin down whether or not there ever really was a man named Cropsey and whether he committed any crimes.  The answer is…it isn’t clear.  There was a man named Jasper Cropsey who lived in New York, but so far as I can tell he never committed any axe murders.  The documentary Cropsey frames its entire narrative around the crimes of Andre Rand, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering several children in the 80′s on Staten Island.  While he certainly could not have been the man whose crimes originated the legend, given how recently he committed his crimes, he’s become part of the legend in that region of the country at least.

Like any number of urban legends, we probably will never know for certain where the legend of Cropsey originated.  These sorts of stories begin from seemingly nowhere and take on lives of their own.  Cropsey in particular has had a great deal of longevity, especially since his legend has inspired key parts of the modern slasher flick.  We might not know where Cropsey came from, but we can be certain that he’s here to stay.

Posted in: Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Curse of Bigfoot

June 18, 2012 7:49 pm / 6 Comments /
Curse of Bigfoot is a 1978 movie about a group of high school students who unleash an inhuman monster from a crypt.

…seriously. You need to see this movie. I mean…come on! Look at the poster!

I sit here literally at a loss for words.  Last night I watched a movie so tremendously, horrifically, hilariously bad that they don’t make an -ly word strong enough to describe the mind-melting horrible awesomeness of it.  The moving I’m talking about is called Curse of Bigfoot, and it is a tour de force of B-movie horror at its finest.

A bit of background about how I came across this little gem.  My dad lent me a horror collection called Pure Terror, which contains fifty “classic” horror movies.  Such masterpieces as The Manster (panned as one of the worst movies ever made–I’ve yet to see it) and Track of the Moonbeast (which was victimized in a great episode of MST3K) are represented in the collection’s line up.   It sat on my TV stand for about three days before I finally decided to give it a look.  I saw Curse of Bigfoot on the back cover and my crappy movie sense started tingling.  Somehow, I knew that movie would be a rare treat and boy howdy I was not disappointed.

Curse of Bigfoot is…well, it’s sort of hard to say what it’s about because the thing is a mishmash. That’s because really it is an amalgamation of two movies.  Curse began life as Teenagers Battle the Thing in 1958.  Near as I can tell, Teenagers Battle the Thing never saw the light of day until 1978 (or maybe 1972…or 1974; I’ve seen three different release years) when the director  slapped on an extra thirty odd minutes of footage and called it Curse of Bigfoot.

An image of the monster from Curse of Bigfoot

Witness the glorious stupidity of…Bigfoot? Whatever the hell that thing is supposed to be, at any rate.

As you might guess, this Frankenstein of a movie involves teenagers.  But more on that in a second.  This is literally the only monster movie I’ve seen that reveals the titular beastie in the first ten minutes. And holy God is it hilarious!  It’s a guy in a gorilla suit with a paper mache mask made to vaguely resemble The Wolfman.  You can even see the eye holes.  I’m not kidding you one bit.  I have pictures!

The thirty odd minutes of footage added twenty years after the original (boy that’s weird to say) are a bunch of inarticulate nonsense that have little to do with the actual movie.  There’s a scene where a monster that looks suspiciously like the titular Bigfoot stalks a woman.  Mind you, the scene was done in broad daylight but it’s clear from the dialog that it was supposed to take place at night.  This scene though is a clip from a movie being shown in a high school, a class devoted entirely to mythological monsters apparently.  There’s talk about their guest speaker, who is coming to speak to them about Bigfoot, before another long clip that looks like an instructional film about the lumber industry cut with clips of a guy in a bad Bigfoot costume stalking a couple of loggers.  Finally, the speaker appears and tells the story of his encounter with Bigfoot.  In one of the greatest lines of the movie, the guest speaker describes how one of the young ladies with him on this expedition is now nothing more than a catatonic vegetable.

That’s right.  This movie doesn’t get to the ACTUAL movie until half an hour in, but boy is the wait worth it.  We’re treated to the worst acting and special effects this side of Troll 2.  The guest speaker is a former science teacher who, when he and his group encountered Bigfoot, was a part of an archeological dig (for some reason) that consisted of himself, an archeologist, and a gaggle of teenagers.

Another shot of Bigfoot from Curse of Bigfoot

…this is just endlessly hilarious.

The group eventually (I’m fast-forwarding a bit because there is a LOT of scene padding) discovers a mysterious crypt that contains a mummy encased in clay.  Being the wonderful archeologists they were, the group decides to gank the mummy from its resting place and stuff it into a shed, where it is revealed that the clay enclosed a horrify(ingly bad looking) monster!

The monster goes on what has to be the lamest rampage in B-movie history–I think it killed maybe one person and then at the thrilling climax of the film it just sort of stands there and lets the teenagers douse it with gasoline.

…sorry if I spoiled it for you.  As if you can spoil a movie as rotten as this.  Anyway, Curse of Bigfoot has to be seen to be believed.  It hits you like a freight train of awesome-badness.  If you’re like me and you like really, really lame movies you’ll want to do yourself a favor and give this one a look.  You’ll be glad you did.

How about you? Have you ever seen a movie so bad it was nearly a religious experience?  What’s the best/worst movie you’ve ever seen?


Posted in: Monsters & Mythology, Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Horror Review Two-fer–The Human Centipede I and II

June 11, 2012 8:57 am / 8 Comments /
The Human Centipede, directed by Tom Six

“Their flesh is his fantasy”

Those who have read my blog for awhile now know that I have a distaste for the torture porn sub-genre–in my experience, most of them are little more than plot-less excuses to sling a bunch of gore and body parts at a camera array.  Like the exploitation films of the seventies onward, they’re all style and no substance but with one difference; namely, they trade style for something akin to blunt force trauma.  While exploitation films could be goofy fun, the cinematic equivalent of a Twinkie, torture porn often lacks the wink and nod toward the audience and instead focuses on showing the inner workings of the human anatomy as explicitly as possible.

…in light of that last sentence I should once again define torture porn.  It’s not actual pornography, but rather it is called torture porn because it features explicit displays of violence and torture.  Think movies like Saw (which is actually quite a good film…the later ones not so much) and Hostel (never seen it).  I’ve touched on the topic before in my review of the abominable film Philosophy of a Knife.

With all of that in mind, you’ll understand why I put off seeing The Human Centipede for as long as I did.  This is one of those movies that people talk about in whispers, a movie that teenagers at sleep overs challenge each other to sit through without gagging.  That sort of thing.  Being that I tend to at least half pay attention to what goes on in the horror genre, I knew the entire premise of the movie: a German surgeon grafts three hapless tourists together end to end forming the titular Human Centipede.  Certainly a disgusting thing, considering the mechanics of their shared digestion, but I didn’t see how it was a concept that could carry an entire movie.  Plus, I’d heard that it was an abominably bad film from reviewers and a few people I knew who had seen it.

Still, the damned thing kept popping up on Netflix until my curiosity got the better of me and I finally watched it.  I knew The Human Centipede would be bad, but I couldn’t have expected it to be anywhere near as bad as it was.  There was no plot to speak of, just a bunch of stuff happening to pad out the length of the movie to an agonizing hour and a half.  When the Human Centipede was finally revealed, it really didn’t live up to the build up.  Maybe for people first seeing the movie, but not two or three years after it was made.  Plus, it didn’t help that the director couldn’t be bothered to develop his characters.  Had he done so, their plight would have been more disturbing.  Don’t get me wrong–the entire concept is disturbing.  But the movie lacks any kind of impact other than the gag factor because there is not any character development.  Rather than actual people, the victims of the mad doctor’s surgery are little more than the cinematic equivalent of cardboard cut outs.

That lack of character development led to one of the two things I found surprising about The Human Centipede.  The first was that the movie was boring.  Oh my good Lord was it boring!  Forty-five minutes in I felt like I’d been sitting there for two hours.  Both the lack of plot and the lack of any sort of characterization sucked any tension out of what could have been quite an intense movie.  Only one scene made me feel tense, and that was the crawling chase scene where the lead guy of the Human Centipede, a random Japanese guy, disabled the mad doctor and led an escape attempt.

“100% medically INaccurate”

The other bit that surprised me was the amount of restraint the director showed when it came to gore.  There was surprisingly little of it, despite the premise of the film.  That might have been a disappointment for the gore-hounds out there, but I was impressed.  But that feeling quickly dissipated when I decided to subject myself to The Human Centipede 2, where Tom Six more than made up for the lack.

You might ask me why I watched the second movie if I didn’t like the first.  I’m not sure I have an answer for that, other than that I’m a glutton for punishment.  If the first Human Centipede was terrible, the second was absolutely abysmal.  HC2 featured a bug-eyed recluse obsessed with the original The Human Centipede.  That’s right–HC2 takes place in the “real” world, where apparently someone liked The Human Centipede enough to try and reenact it.

…it only gets worse from there.  You might be asking how that’s possible, but believe me it is.  I’m not even sure what to say about HC2, other than that it is completely disgusting, stupid, and reprehensible.  The amount of gore in the movie isn’t quite cartoonish, but it is nearly so.  While HC1 tried to build tension and strike you with the horror of the scenario its characters found itself in, HC2 dropped all pretenses and became pure torture porn.  But it’s all filmed in black and white, so it’s artsy (that’s how that works, right?).  I think Tom Six attempted to top himself with HC2, and he certainly did but not how he intended.  He proved that you could make a movie even more boring, stupid, and offensive than The Human Centipede.  No mean feat, that.

Do you ever find yourself watching a movie you know is going to be awful in spite of yourself?  Have you seen either of these movies, and if so what did you think?


Posted in: Movie Reviews, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Allure of B-Movies

June 6, 2012 10:08 am / 11 Comments /
Poster art from the 1954 B-movie classic, THEM!

I also like the posters from the old days. They’re fun!

Ah…B-movies.  I enjoy cheesy old sci-fi/horror movies from the fifties and sixties, especially the black and white ones.  Those are my favorite types of B-movies, and I think the most iconic of the bunch although the genre is alive and well in the 21st century.  If you want proof, just flip to SyFy on Saturday nights at nine and you’ll see what I mean.

Even so, the B-movies from fifty or sixty years ago are in a league of their own.  They have an innocent charm that modern B-movies often lack.  There was no CGI back in those days, and often these movies were made on a shoestring budget, but the cheesy special effects were part of the fun.  Often B-movies followed a set formula.  Typically they involved an incident of science gone wrong–most often the culprit was radiation of some sort, but it could also be the work of a mad scientist–that resulted in some freakish monster (usually a guy in a rubber suit).  The protagonists turn to conservative forces such as the military and police, or toward science to find the solution to the problem.  I use the word “science” loosely here, because by today’s standards the science they played with was laughable.  Another subset of the genre involved an alien invasion, which would once again be thwarted by conservative forces or by science.

Writers and directors back in the day took the formula I just described above and had all sorts of fun with it.  THEM! is a perfect example of the genre; in fact, it’s often cited as the textbook example of the B-movie genre.  The movie is about ants that become enormous as a result of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing out in Nevada.  These giant ants spread all over the world and establish colonies, and (naturally) it’s up to the U.S. Army and some scientists to clear the matter up.  It sounds silly, but seriously give THEM! a watch sometime when you can–it’s actually a pretty good movie.

Night of the Living Dead is also a B-movie modeled on a formula similar to the one I outlined above, but it’s noticeably darker and really helped to give birth to the modern horror movie (for better or worse).  NOTLD featured ghouls–the word zombie was never used in the movie itself–who were raised from the dead ostensibly by strange radiation from a Venus probe.  These ghouls were shown on film eating people.  And it’s hard to spoil a fifty year old movie, but suffice it to say the ending was NOT in line with the typical B-movie up to that point.  George Romero turned the B-movie formula on its head while simultaneously remaining faithful to the tradition–no small feat, that.  Night of the Living Dead is another example of a B-movie that, when you get beyond the cheap special effects and bad acting, was in the end a pretty good movie (one of my all time favorites, actually).

And that right there is why I like B-movies.  When you get beyond the goofy premises and hokey special effects and look deeply at the movie, they often tell pretty good stories.  They couldn’t rely on special effects like today’s movies–don’t get me wrong though, modern B-movies are great fun but they often rely too heavily on gore and SFX for my taste–so instead they had to attempt to tell a decent story.  That, and the actors actually had to act, while no doubt biting back laughter at the goofy looking dude in the rubber suit.  Granted, many B-movies were lousy in the story and acting departments both, but they at least made up for it with unintentional hilarity (Plan 9 From Outer Space comes to mind).

Zombies from George Romero's B-movie classic, Night of the Living Dead

Zombies. This picture has gotten a lot of mileage on this blog, I’ve noticed =P.

Those aren’t the only reasons I like B-movies.  Sometimes I get tired of the cynicism of our age, an attitude that leaks into our cinematic culture, as it must.  In terms of horror, that translates into nihilistic plots, gore, and copious amounts of sex.  There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but sometimes I get sick of it.  I want to interrupt myself at this point to say that I was brought up in a socially conservative household and live in a conservative area and while I do not subscribe to all of those beliefs now, their influence is still there.  So for me, it is a breath of fresh air to watch an old time movie where the most gore you might see is a bit of chocolate sauce smeared on someone’s shirt, that ends on a note of optimism rather than cynicism (NOTLD is an exception to all of this, of course).

The saying goes that “they don’t make’em like they used to”.  True to some extent.  While horror and movies in general have become objectively better in many ways than their predecessors from the old days, nothing can replace the fun and charm of the old time B-movies.

What are your cinematic guilty pleasures?  Do you like the B monster movies from the fifties and sixties, or do they bore you to tears?


Posted in: Life & Writing, Monsters & Mythology, Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Zombie Apocalypse: You. Will. Not. Survive.

June 1, 2012 8:29 am / 3 Comments /
An image depicting a female zombie from George Romero's seminal zombie movie, "Night of the Living Dead"

Probably a bad day if you see somebody looking like this coming your way.

As I am certain you have noticed, zombies are pretty much everywhere today.  They’ve stumbled from books to movies to television, and now they’re even in commercials.  They’ve gone from B-movie horror fare to a pop culture phenomena.  It is at the point now where you hear the phrase “zombie apocalypse” on nearly a routine basis, and not only from die-hard zombie fans; even average non-rabid fans plan (hopefully only in good fun) what they would do in the event of the zombie uprising.

When I hear people talk so casually about zombies, the question always occurs to me: “Do they realize just how AWFUL that would be?”.  Seriously.  Step back for a moment and think about what you’re saying when you wish the zombies would come.  You’re talking not only about the dead rising from their graves (or people becoming infected with a rabies-like pathogen, or some combination of the above) but you’re talking about death on a massive scale.  The zombie plague as shown by the movies and books would make the Black Death look like an outbreak of chicken pox.  We’re talking a highly virulent, easily spread pathogen with nearly a 100% mortality rate ripping through a global population of about 7 billion people like a wild fire through a forest doused with gasoline.

But it gets worse.  The dead don’t stay dead (obviously since we’re talking zombies) and they come back to feast on the living.  Let’s stop there for a moment; you don’t just get infected, you get cannibalized by your friends, neighbors, and family members.  It would be difficult if not impossible for people (who aren’t sociopaths) to shoot their friends and family members–there’s a reason those sorts of scenes appear often in zombie fiction, because it would probably be true.  That alone would kill more than half the folks who believe they’d go out and be an apocalyptic cowboy, survival plans be damned.

Speaking of, let’s look at survival plans.  All have one fundamental flaw, at least for most folks in Western countries like the US.  Most of us have not truly had to survive, to live off the land.  Most of us do not know what it is to live in constant fear of imminent death.  We laugh and mock the characters in zombie movies for the often objectively stupid things that they do which are inevitably are punished by the cinematic equivalent of karma.  As I often point out when I’m watching these types of shows with people, we viewers are sitting comfortable, warm, and safe so the most logical and sensible course of action seems obvious.  The situation would be quite a bit different if zombies were real as fear makes people do funny things.  Stupid things.  Things that would probably seem pretty laughable to people in less trying circumstances.

But let’s say you manage to survive the initial onslaught of the zombie plague and hole up somewhere safe.  There is one thing that most survival plans likely aren’t going to take into account: co-infections.  When there is a huge outbreak of a disease, its spread leaves huge chunks of the population that aren’t dead with weakened immune systems, which allows other nasty diseases to take a foothold.  The most recent trend in zombie lore has the entire species infected with the zombie pathogen, that only becomes active upon death or contact with a living form of the pathogen.  If that were the case, then the scenario I outlined in the previous sentence would probably be true.  Things like measles, mumps, whooping cough, and the flu would run rampant through survivors, likely killing a good portion of them in the absence of things like public healthcare and ready access to medication.

I could go on, but I won’t belabor the point.  A zombie apocalypse would be bad (ummmkay?) and no matter how badass a person might think they are, the likelihood of survival is really, really slim.  I’ll never forget what one of my biology professors said in reference to pandemic disease: “Someone is going to be immune.  But not you.”  In light of that, I think we ought to count ourselves lucky that plague zombies are nothing more than fantasy.

What’s your take on all of this?  Are you a bit sick of hearing about zombies too?


Posted in: Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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