Horror-a-rama II: The Horrorier

Just two more films that I forced my roommate to endure last night.

House of the Devil: This is a film that I have had in my queue for a while now, but that I avoided actually watching because someone suggested that it got really gruesome in the last half hour. While it may not be immediately clear, I do not actually deal with either gore or suspense particularly well. I'm better than I used to be, but I still tend to get really keyed up by suspense, to the point where I will pause a movie and walk around a bit. I'm an anxious guy; don't judge. I have an even bigger problem with gore, any movie where the viscera can be described as "frequent and glistening" tends to turn me off. (This is why I tend to avoid zombie movies altogether.) My general rule of thumb is: nothing made in the past 20 years. Something about that temporal distance, or possibly the less complicated visual effects, renders it palatable to me. It's why most of the movies I've mentioned this Halloween are from the 1960s.

This movie, however: it LOOKS like it was made over 20 years ago. The style of the film, the technology they use, the hair, they all scream "early-1980s." And while I have not embraced 80s horror with quite the enthusiasm that I've embraced 70s horror, I enjoyed it a great deal. The performances were strong almost across the board, with Mary Woronov in particular giving a wonderfully creepy performance, given her limited time on screen -- seriously, what an amazing career that lady's had! I love her! As to the gruesomeness of the ending? I actually was a little disappointed that it wasn't even more insane than it was, but that disappointed is tempered a bit by the low-boil of suspense that the movie had us in through most of its running time. I went in with some reservations, but I actually really liked it a lot.

The Vampire Lovers: Well, that was certainly something! This is another Hammer Horror movie that weaseled its way into my queue thanks to Dr. K. I'm pretty sure that I would have gotten more out of this if I got anything out of women's breasts. Or women kissing each other. Or women in general. It was well made enough, and the acting was more consistent than Vampire Circus, but it was just a series of women in peril, usually with a breast or two hanging out. They never explain why this elaborate ruse was necessary just for Carmilla to feed, what the point of it was, nor do they bother to explain the waxy man in black, which I hold against the film. That said, it was entertaining enough, just not particularly scary.

Horror-a-rama

So, I've been binging on horror movies lately, because 'tis the season, and also I was able to bully my roommate into letting me use the Roku unit. All of these movies are available on Netflix Instant. Among the things I watched were:

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: I'm not really sure why I had this on my instant queue, but it's been there for a while. I seem to recall either a commentary or critical article citing it as an influence on a movie I enjoyed a lot, but what that movie was is lost in the mists of time, leaving only this. It's OK, I guess: the episodic nature of the movie kept things rolling at a steady clip, and my roommate and I amused ourselves by guessing the twist endings to every section. But after a while, it just felt overstuffed: they seriously were just shoving in every genre they could into the stories, and the only thing really unifying them was their fatalism. The cast was surprisingly familiar, with Peter Cushing, Donald Sutherland, Christopher Lee, and Michael Gough -- the last one perhaps most familiar as Alfred from Batman '89. But the protagonists' behavior in the stories didn't make much sense at times, and the threats weren't very imaginative. Plus, and this bugged the hell out of me: Dr. Terror had a more-than-full tarot deck -- the stack he had was so thick I wondered if they were printed on graham crackers -- but the only cards he pulled were from the Major Arcana. That sort of thing almost bugs me as much as when they pull cards that don't exist. Yes, I'm a geek.

Circus of Horrors: How was this, in any way, a horror film? It was more a crime film than anything. The set-up doesn't suck: a rogue plastic surgeon goes underground after changing his own face, inherits a circus via an unfortunate "accident", and then starts stocking the ranks of the circus with scarred criminals that he uses his abilities to pretty up. If there's one thing Eyes Without A Face (released the same year) has taught us, it's that plastic surgeons are seriously creepy. Circuses have been a bottomless well of creepiness for a long time now. So why does this movie play like a domestic drama? The doctor keeps falling in love with the ingénues in his circus, but when they reject him, or try to leave the circus, he has them killed by one of his henchmen. Only the deaths are always made to look like accidents, and always happen while the girls are doing their routine in the ring. The doctor's distance from the murders, his relative lack of passion, and the fact that all the deaths look like accidents, does little to increase the level of suspense. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff, with unrequited loves and blackmail and investigations, that it starts to seem a lot more like a soap opera than anything else. And, even though he recruits a circus of criminals, they never even do any crime! (Except for killing the 14 girls he's fallen for.) Apparently he just wants criminals so that he'll have information to hold over them if they ever want to rat him out to the police.

Vampire Circus: At least with this movie, I know the reason it was in my queue: Dr. K featured it in his Halloween Countdown last year, and I was intrigued enough to want to watch it. (Dr. K always did a great job with the horror movie write-ups; here's hoping he returns to it again!) This movie did a much better job of making the circus itself clearly awful: putting aside the fact that at least three of its members are vampires, it also has a mute strongman (played by the future body of Darth Vader!), and the creepiest little-person clown imaginable.

Seriously, this fella needs a job as a henchman for the Joker, he's that creepy. And then there's the human woman, introduced at the very beginning of the film, who actually seems to get sexually excited watching her vampire lover drink from and kill a little girl she's brought him from the village. That scene is effectively creepy. As is the fact that the village the movie takes place in is slowly being killed by a strain of rabies carried by the bats in the area: it's clear that the village is dying before the circus comes to town, a victim of an infection within its boundaries, possibly because of a curse left upon it by the vampire they killed at the beginning of the movie. Because of this, the village itself has been quarantined by the government, and anybody who tries to leave it is shot on sight, with nobody allowed to enter the village, either. Nobody, that is, but THE VAMPIRE CIRCUS! It's not a perfect movie, but it is a pretty effective one. Certainly creepier than the other two.

Let The Right One In: I can't explain why I hadn't seen this movie before now: I've certainly seen plenty written about it online, by critics and friends whose opinions I respect speaking about it in glowing terms. Part of it might have just me being contrary. But a couple nights ago, my roommate demanded (SIGH) that he choose a Halloween-type movie for us to watch, and of the options he gave me, this is the one I opted for. It isn't particularly scary, and it isn't particularly gruesome, but it is very well acted, and it is shot absolutely beautifully. Watching its outdoor scenes actually made me feel colder. The ending is more complicated and sad than it seems, although that same description could go for the movie as a whole. It's Bergman-esque horror. I liked it.

Creepshow: Another film selected by my roommate. I had actually seen about 4/5s of this movie before, and had been impressed at the time by the sudden flares of non-natural lighting whenever danger loomed. The set-ups tended to be a tad corny (which I realize was part of the point), and the sudden intrusion of panels and graphics from comics a little distracting -- I thought the lighting shifts, suddenly mimicking four-color printing, accomplished the same thing, less obtrusively. The one segment I hadn't seen, the last one, was genuinely creepy, and it reminded me of Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls." That's a good thing. And the shot of the bugs rupturing from the skin gave me my only genuine moment of queasiness throughout the whole movie, in spite of the latex being a bit obvious.

Ham Sandwich

Tonight, in honor of the Halloween season, I watched Theatre of Blood with Vincent Price. It is not in any way great cinema: it's yet another movie where Price takes ghoulish revenge on all the fools that ever doubted him. Standard stuff for him, really, but the magic of Vincent Price is that, no matter how goofy or unbelievable a movie is on its face, I never doubt for a second his commitment to the role, or the fact that he's having a ball playing it.

The movie is not as surreal or as visually inventive as, say, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and it strains credibility that the critics he is dispatching are quite as oblivious as they turn out to be. I mean, honestly, once a few of your peers have been murdered, wouldn't you be just the teensiest bit suspicious to come home and find that strange people had broke into your home and made you a meal of mystery meat? Also, the identity of his handlebar-mustachioed hippie protege is not quite the mystery that the film seems to think it is. But it is fun seeing him playing a gay hairdresser with an afro (!), and for once he plays opposite a female lead (Diana Rigg) that can match him in the acting department. In short: I love Vincent Price. Tomorrow perhaps I'll finally watch Witchfinder General!