Deadpan Comic Horror International: 13 Wild Oddities worth Streaming

"Take any fire, any earthquake, any major disaster, then wonder." - Plan Nine from Outer Space

Summer's in its last dying gasp and thank God. I was working on a list here of something else... something more serious and sociologically important, like lesbianism, or 'The Incredible Dissolving Father' which is, as you know, my unfinished thesis capstonezzzzz for the course not taken. But instead... doesn't anyone remember laughter? And horror? Death's too short for lofty theses and lifestyles from which I am twicefold excluded and therefore fascinated by.

The horror-comedy hybrid on the other hand, is all-inclusive. Fear leavened with laughs is like whiskey and ginger ale, like campfires and a leavening quip after a scary urban legend. After all, by day we joke about the monsters that scare us at night. At least I do. Whatever the reason, it's global - and as old as time - and we deserve better than Haunted House 2 and Scary Movie III and V (I won't allow myself to see 'em - but you can on Netflix).

Luckily, an array of options exists from all around the world, each with a mixture all its own of both elements. Some might be unintentionally funny, some are just 'witty' or 'stoner' horror/sci fi movies, not comedies John Dies at the End, Iron Sky, or Cabin in the Woods aren't included here because you just saw them or should. See them! Then wonder.

Hong Kong
OUT OF THE DARK

"Wui wan yeh" (1995) Dir. Stephen Chow
***1/2

Lucky for America, we have most of the Stephen Chow oeuvre on Netflix Streaming (still need the great and hilarious Forbidden City Cop). Here's one I'd never seen before. A huge star in HK and Mainland China, here he's mostly unknown, partly because he's not Jackie Chan or Jet Li and his satire skewers a pop culture partially different than ours but if you've seen any Asian horror movies in the last ten years -- Ringu, Ju-On, Pulse, Dark Water, Suicide Club, Tale of Two Sisters, Audition, A Chinese Ghost Story, etc. --and western films beloved of China, like The Professional and Evil Dead, you should get at least 80% of the jokes (though amazingly, this 1995 film prefigures the entire J-Horror crossover boom here in the states). Chow stars as a crazy ghost hunter called to a towering HK apartment complex to exorcise the vengeful spirit of a couple's recently deceased mother. The daughter (the great Karen Mok) is cute and restless and finds Chow's ghost chaser--with his long black coat, sunglasses and mysterious Chow Yun Fatty ways--intriguing. Soon she's showing up where he lives (an upscale lunatic asylum) dressed like Natalie Portman in The Professional.  He lets her carry his houseplant, with its flower that acts as a diving rod.

On the other hand, he's crazy. Like legit.

There's too much going on to name, but I particularly loved the juxtaposition of Chow's memories of his initial encounters with the supernatural while at a carnival as a child with what he actually saw (where he was clearly remembering all the papier mache monsters as real -left); and a weird scene where he tries to train the security guards to conquer their fears via games of lit dynamite hot potato. It's raucous but so fast you're afraid to laugh lest you miss something. It's also relentlessly scary and intense, with an extended lunatic climax that wipes away old dreads with one hand even as it's wiping new ones in with the other. (In Cantonese w/ English subtitles) 

New Zealand 
HOUSEBOUND

(2014) Dir Gerard Johnstone
***

Morgana O'Reilly does a wild, sneering bravura turn as Kylie Bucknell, an under-house-arrest punk partier cross between DEAD FILES' physical medium Amy Allan and Nicky Marotta from TIMES SQUARE (1980)- must I learn all I can about her? I must, for her wild chutzpah reflects what's missing in American womanhood? Kyle is a bit of a self-absorbed bitch, but hey, who wouldn't be a bitch if stuck, ankle bracelet monitor-first, in a haunted house presided over by a sweet but nonstop babbling mum (Rima Te Wiata), a mostly-absentee stepdad, and a house that--though bordered within and without by maniacs, ghostly visitors, and a squirrel-skinning neighbor--still suffocates with twee folksiness?  I can't reveal more about the plot, especially once it veers towards a rainy rooftop climax, but I will suggest you just relax and let go as your genre expectations are fucked with but in a way that's just deadpan enough to win you over to its weird sense of humor, and scary enough to keep you watching past the occasional ODs of kiwi quirkiness. Just keep your big red eyes on the cool, fearless Kylie who, among other things, isn't afraid to sneak into the suspected killer's house while he's asleep in order to steal the bridgework right out of his mouth. Sweet as! Her mom might be a bit much, but Kylie'll fuck you right up. (See also: The Babadook)

Spain

BITCHES' SABBATH
(aka Witching and Bitching)

"Las brujas de Zugarramurdi" (2014) - Dir. Alex de la Iglesia
***1/2

Largely undiscovered in the US (his stuff is seldom dubbed, which keeps the audience that would most appreciate him at bay, i.e. drunk flyover staters) Alex de la Iglesia is a maniac worth reading subtitles for even if you need to hold a hand over one eye to do it. This is one of his best. a ballsy 'comedy of the sexes' that bursts with mucho original ideas, carnal energy, wit, acumen, and Jungian archetypal initiation ritual mysticism. It's like a gender-reversed Magic Flute if Mozart smoked meth and was married to a hot-tempered harridan from Seville. Hugo Silva stars as a struggling divorced dad, driven past the point of his insanity by his hyper-intense and bitter ex-wife (Macarena Gómez). Beginning with a gone-awry pawn shop robbery and culminating at a bizarre witches' sabbath, the action never lets up and the astonished laughs never stop rolling in. Evoking that other great contemporary midnight movie Spaniard, Almodovar, the coven they stumble on includes a drag queen and features a great three-generational female enclave: there's the older, slightly senile--but always ready to rend a man's flesh with her sharpened steel dentures--Maritxtu (Terele Pávez); the grand dame of the coven, Graciana (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura); and the hot younger daughter Eva (the electric Carolina Bang - who rocks wild Kate McKinnon-style crazy eyes). They leap through the air, crawl on the ceiling, eat a steady diet of psychoactive toad secretions and cooked male children, and are all-in-all so evil they make the witches in Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem seem like the ones in Bewitched... 

And yet... they're jubilant and fun- there's no time to be traumatized as it all enfolds like one mad chase from a an afternoon robbery to a midnight monstrous Willendorf ceremony (that must be seen but still not believed) to a chase all the way through the dawn's merciless light.

Too bad about the tacky American title, though (Witching and Bitching? Yeesh)... and the poster art that makes it seem like a Disney movie. It ain't... no Disney movie, man! It defrosts Walt's head and eats its brains as a mousse. Going boldly through worlds, beyond where most battle-of-the-sexes movies dare go, its cogency in the face of insane chthonic maenad rendering makes it not just hilarious, but truly liberating, and muy sexy. Soy mu encantado! (more)  (In Spanish with English subtitles)

Ireland
 GRABBERS 

 (2012) Dir Jon Wright
***

It's an Irish horror-monster-comedy hybrid that's part of the lineage of solid indie horror films set in the more remote and storm-swept parts of the Emerald Isles, loosely following the 'fish-out-of-water cop relocates to quirky remote town, solves string of murders' structure so common to every BBC miniseries. Here the outsider is a by-the-book but-fetching Holly Hunter-ish cop (Ruth Bradley) who winds up saddled with a curly-haired drunkard for a partner, one long turned half-assedly morose from the sameness of his misty life (join the club!). The murders turn out to be done by giant tentacled monsters who besiege the island and love but can't process alcohol (join the club!), and the whole town gathers to arm themselves at the pub, i.e. get hammered, for their own safety! In other words, every sober alcoholic's secret fantasy (I have to drink to save my life? I am delivered!)

I've never been one for curly haired Irishmen and this film's got more than one, but Bradley's charming enough to carry the film over the rough spots, and when her character gets drunk for the first time, she becomes like a little two-fisted twinkly-eyed flush-cheeked Gallic faerie.. They have a delirious extended stake-out in the rain scene, craftily lit to make every rain drop in the deluge glisten with pregnant menace and add a depth note of genuine unease to the otherwise near-Rene Clair-style fantasy-romance. Director Wright ably captures the lovely sunsets and the stark treeless beauty of the coastline, though there's a few too many green and azure filters (as in most Irish films of the moment trying to hide their HDV origins) but the whole third act goes down over one long night, filters gone, so 'tis no burden. And like all the best horror films, it ends as dawn breaks... my favorite time of the day, presuming I've been up all night for it (rather than getting up early)... not that I ever do, get up early... that is.

I've said too much.

South Korea

THE HOST

"Gwoemul" (2006) Dir. Bong Joon-Ho
***1/2

A solid storyteller, able to inject more satiric deadpan comedy into more horrific circumstances than Shakespeare, Howard Hawks and Chaplin combined, rolled up, dipped in a sewer, "smokin'"Bong Joon-Ho is no stranger to big issue pathos fusing with doe-eyed bloody cool. HOST encompasses a broad satire against America's containment policies, blind-eye pollution, and hypocritical politics, all while providing a nail-biting endurance test as one bravely dysfunctional family tries to escape a military cover-up quarantine to rescue their young daughter/granddaughter before she dies of consumption, or is consumed by the weird mutant plesiosaurus-frog monster that's spat her out amidst its rotting corpse larder deep inside the Seoul sewer system. It can be a rough viewing experience, undergoing the constant transition between this shivering girl's dwindling optimism and the obstacles faced by her extended family as they follow her weak phone signal. What a family! There's the bronze medalist archery sister; the kindly bumpkin grandfather who presumes bribes and a hangdog look will get him through any scrape; the brother who's 'been to college' so his constant criticism of everyone else's decisions leaves him paralyzed with inaction; and the girl's dimwitted single dad (Bong's blonde-mopped regular leading man Kang-ho Song) who gamely punches his way through his own lobotomy.

Bong loves setting up our expectations for a 'giant monster' film and then skewing them, but he has a vision for mankind so dark and disturbing it almost rings true as stealth optimism. Time and again his heroes destroy themselves on the altar of a better future for their children, which of course can't ever happen. In the process, he gets endless jabs at SK's split personality: burdened by both America and itself, yet somehow finding time to love each other even as they devour the middle class between them. (In Korean with English subtitles; see also: Snowpiercer)

Chinatown (SF, California)

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

(1986) Dir. John Carpenter
****

Released towards the end of sci fi's golden era, it took the small screen for Carpenter's satirical badass answer to Indiana Jones to find an audience of initially bewildered, half-asleep kids watching HBO on Saturday afternoons. Slowly, one at a time, we snapped out of their stupors in awe. Over the decades, through word of mouth mainly, the film became the beloved cult item it is today. I watch it at least once a year. Kurt Russell stars as Jack Burton, a blustery trucker (a rugged type of hero that was, believe it or not, a thing in the 70s, i.e, Convoy, White Line Fever, Every Which Way But Loose, High-Ballin', etc.) who winds up embroiled in mystery, monsters, and magic (!) in, around, behind, and most importantly under the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown. Carpenter packs the film with an array of welcome familiar Asian-American faces like John Lone as the tittering evil Lo Pan and the Victor Wong as a white magic wizard herb expert. There's also a gorgeous green-eyed young creature, then a total unknown, named Kim Cattrall as intrepid reporter Gracie Law. Wang (Dennis Dun) who's the one who actually does the fighting and has the romance, and so forth. Russell is hilarious, his chemistry with Cattral riveting (back during those sleepy HBO afternoons, we kids all first fell in love with her). Unmissable and beyond classic, Big Trouble doesn't even reveal its full glory until around the 12th viewing. I can't wait to see it again, when the tide is high. 

Norway
DEAD SNOW: RED VS. DEAD
"Dod Sno" (2014) Dir. Tommy Wirkola
***

The Bride of Frankenstein of satirical Nazi zombie pictures, it starts during the climax of the first film: Martin (Vegar Hoel) wakes up in Norway's socialized healthcare system with the the dreaded Colonel Herzog's (Ørjan Gamst) arm sewed onto him (the EMPs found it in the car with him) and now Martin can raise the dead. Naturally once he's released he resurrects a bunch of Russian POWs (that were executed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave up in the Norwegian mountains - so I guess the frost preserved them fairly well), to go up against Herzog's still slaughterin' crew (who find time to rampage through a WW2 museum and get their hands on an old still-functional Panzer tank!). Martin also recruits three young American geeks-- 'the Zombie Squad' --to fly up to help him: Martin Starr (Party Down, Burning Love), Ingrid Haas, and the lovely Jocelyn DeBoer (above center) as the type who can have her pick of any man at the San Diego comic-con but probably doesn't even realize it, which adds to her smokey eyes and long red hair to make her the coolest thing south of the Arctic circle. Best of all, aside from an over-the-top small town sheriff (who thinks Martin is the one killing everyone), the cast plays it dead straight, as nature, science and Nordic tradition demands. Miss it at your own risk. It's in English (not dubbed): even the non-American actors speak it beautifully, but if you watch this back-to-back with the Norwegian language first film the result can be jarring, so don't.

Southern France

ZOMBIE LAKE 

"Le lac des morts vivants" (1981) Dir. Jean Rollin
**

This film gets a bad rap within the Nazi zombie community, but it's a great melancholy chablis blanc after the steak tartare and whiskey meal of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (above) if you're watching these in the presented order here. In fact, it gives a big French shoulder shrug to zombie horror movie conventions on the whole, as if they were nothing more than an annoying American tourist. Instead, as with most Jean Rollin films, Le lac prefers to loll and gambol in the natural stillness of a rural France in the company of beautiful young women and a few older character actors. Thanks to a nice HD restoration, the full pastorale lyricism of Max Monteillet's photography comes out and we can see inside the deep stark shadows of the narrow ancient architecture of village streets. There's very little dialogue, but lots of nature sounds (running water, a few bugs, a scream or two), and Daniel White's macabrely contrapuntal piano, lounge themes. There's nothing to stop us, in short, from turning off and tuning in to the ambience of the pastoral countryside, a locale where Nazi occupation is still fresh in collective memory. The cast and crew have a lot of Franco regulars but Jean Rollin (posing as J.A. Lasar) is the director and you'll know right away by his usual mix of real local French ruins, terrible fake blood, pretty young girls finding time to bathe and disrobe even when in immediate peril, ennui-crippled actors, and a vibe so French everyone seems to be lolling in the sun even when dragging each other off to be killed.

Special mention: Dredged up from the lake along with the rest of his dead Wermacht unit is a sensitive zombie private who was on his way to visit the offspring of his verboten romance with a local girl just before his unit was killed by French resistance fighters and thrown in the le lac. When he finds his daughter, he protects her from the rest of his outfit --and this all done without any speaking or mime or goofy cues, which makes it eerily touching rather than merely maudlin. Conveniently, nearly early every woman in the village is young, gorgeous, and caught completely off guard when a zombie comes shambling into her backyard, though every one in town knows perfectly well the zombies are around --that's very French! Very French, too, in that the harder it tries to be serious and horrific the more amusing and gently life-affirming it all becomes.  (In French with English subtitles.) 

Barcelona

[REC] 3: GENESIS 

"[Rec]³: Génesis" 2012 Dir. Paco Plaza
***

I don't really like, or haven't seen enough of, the first two [Rec] films but I knew a wedding video would be an ideal zombie subject, since it would basically be all your friends and family in one contained place, making their subsequent transformation from a horde of well-wishing loved ones to grabby monsters like a wedding cake in reverse. And, as the Spanish are a people in whom romantic love runs so strong it trumps self-preservation, I knew there'd be comical twists when the loved ones turned rabid. I was right! But there's other stuff I didn't expect, too. With her popping Clara Bow eyes, tattered wedding gown and chainsaw, Leticia Dolera makes a terrific romantic heroine and Diego Martin (the sheriff in the recommended Dusk to Dawn series on El Rey) struggles gamely inside his medieval helmet and armor as the new husband. Having it all take place within one big gate-enclosed wedding-hosting estate in is genius. The freedom from the constraints of found footage (after the first 20 minutes or so) is managed without losing its diegetic advantages (they just kind of slowly expand from it, not unlike Olivier with the proscenium arch in Henry V). And thanks to leaps forward in digital technology, and the flowery architecture of the manor itself enables a vast depth of HD field, with all sorts of nifty stunts, like figures falling off balconies and fighting off in the distance far behind the foregrounded actors (but still in focus), and the menacing figures emerging from the dark are all sans music cues, making for great jolts and laughs without cheap shocks and mickey-mouse scoring. The intentionally grand all white frills wedding set-up--the disco party lights, white tablecloths, tuxedoes, sexy dresses, grand fixtures and the DJ booth-- offer uncanny frisson to anyone who's spent a significant amount of their weekends going to other people's weddings, secretly wishing some disaster would strike so you could leave early. Favorite comic moments: the girl who admits she almost didn't come, the rifle-wielding SpongeJohn (not SpongeBob, for "trademark reasons"), and the pair of young revelers who miss the whole first half of the outbreak because they're off in the billiard room hooking up... muy Barthelona! (In Spanish with English subtitles).

Hollywood, USA

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS

(1973) Dir. Denis Sanders
**1/2

Displaying kind of the reverse problem of Zombie Lake, Bee Girls' (AKA Graveyard Tramps) only real issue is its dreadful Gary Graver cinematography. He cannot block shots correctly, light anything beyond a bad student movie, or do much more than keep things in focus 80% of the time. He was a busy man, though, working on six other exploitation films in 1973 alone, including Bummer, and The Clones. It could be there's a better negative or restoration somewhere that would prove I'm wrong about old Graver, but I doubt it. Who cares? I do. Fuckin' Love Anitra Ford as a sexy etymologist, the Cronenberg-esque scientific research setting (where scientists are all dying from sexual exhaustion), the lucky break caught temporarily by the gay scientist and the investigating federal agent's relatively enlightened reaction to it, the great buzzing soundtrack and the jet black eyes.

Saskatchewan, Canada

WOLFCOP

(2014) Dir Lowell Dean
***

Shot in the woolly wilderness of Saskatchewan, this weird fusion of woodsy lupine elements includes lumberjackin', copious whiskey drinking, cop car ride-pimping/weaponizing, and a prison visit from a hot bitch bartender wearing a sexy red riding hood cape and bearing a basket of candles, erotic lotions, and fine hooch. Old lady Satanists, a good lady cop, and duplicitous heshers round out the pack. Is Wolfcop kind of rough around the edges? Does the lead have unsightly curly hair even in 'human' form? Sure. But how many films are set and shot wayyy up in the provinces, and of those, how many really capture the woodsy small town sense of boozy depressed/isolation only those of us who've lived through unreasonably harsh and brutal winters in nowhere towns by staying totally drunk 24/7 can know (1). I like it cuz it's aboot more than just dumb Troma snark, crap CGI, or Japanese arterial spray. It's mean, wry and got its nose low to the ground. It may get so drunk it can't remember its own name, but it never forgets to rock. (See also: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil)

Iran (Bakersfield, CA)

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

2014 Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
***1/2

This unique crowd-pleaser isn't funny haha, but funny in that it's like something Tom Waits might make if he were an Iranian vampire girl drinking the oil derrick border town dry in Touch of Evil. A Persian language film rich with a deadpan mastery of Jarmusch-brand motion-in-stillness (though it's way livelier than Jarmusch's misleadingly titled Only Lovers Left Alive), it connects indirectly with two druggy black and white NYC art movies from the 90s, Almeredya's Nadja and Ferrara's The Addiction. (See: Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City) and despite the cultural differences (different coast, decade, language) the similarities to those two films are striking, especially in the importance of alternative music on the soundtrack. Nadja made fine atmospheric use of 90s trip-hop like Portishead; Addiction found urgent West Village grit via Cypress Hill and Skooly D.; Girl makes great use of 80s pop group White Lines' song "Death," which if you didn't know of it before, will make you quietly shuffle it onto your 80s Spotify list quick-as-ya-like.

As "The Girl," Sheila Vand--her black hijab like Dracula's cape--consumes both a coke-dealing thug and a junky dad who lets his son support his habit, and we cheer their gruesome demise by this specter of Muslim feminist vengeance,  I love that she waits until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off their blood (though this is never spelled out, it recalls the druggy blood-harvesting of Dark Angel AKA I Come in Peace). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, Vand's playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way, especially into her touching romance with the semi-cool lead boy.  (In Persian with English subtitles)

----
NOTES
1. I was an English Lit major up in Syracuse NY from 1985-1989 
2. Though based on all her UCB videos, every little (male) nerd comic in the world feels the same way and casts her as his wide-eyed girlfriend, which makes me hate said comics for wasting our time with their wishful Napoleonic ego tripping. Unlike them, Wirkola clearly knows better: boyfriends never enter into Red Vs. Dead, which is just one of its great strengths. Jocelyn! Call me! I'm ever-so smart! 

Analog Hacks, Italian-disguised-as-American-Style: GHOSTHOUSE & WITCHERY (aka LA CASA III and VI) Double Feature

Saw AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON or 'Robots smashing Robots in endless pixelated scrimmage II." Was it entertaining? Sure, but also spectacularly uninvolving.  Was there ever a time when we collectively dreaded the sight of a flashing knife going into a stomach, dreaded it in the same blood-chill, heart-in-the-throat way we get now only when we're at the tippy-top of a roller coaster or looking down from a high railing-less ledge? Hurling a spear or waving a sword took at least some muscle or dexterity back then, and both killer and victim were pressed right up against one another. By contrast, watching our amped-up immortal superheroes battle Ultron and his many digitally-encoded robot soldiers--everyone armored up and invulnerable--is to feel that 'watching someone else play a video game' boredom unique to modern CGI movies. When the stakes are no higher than getting your initials on the board, action becomes just compulsive as a rat pressing a lever over and over that once, long ago, dispensed a single treat.

Low-investment pixel-bashing didn't exist in the 80s, at least not on the big screen (TRON aside).  Effects were done with models, fake blood, exploding plaster heads. In the fast, from-the-hip world of Italian horror especially, things ain't perfect: stuntmen trip over carpets and miss their fake punches by a mile. But we're about as far from ULTRON's empty bot-bashing as it's possible to get.

So far away, in fact, you're practically all the way around again.

I didn't come here to pixel-bash, though, I came to make a ridiculous claim, that Scream Factory's new GHOSTHOUSE / WITCHERY Blu-ray double feature is better than ULTRON, By virtue of its analog tactile hurtiness, pre-CGI Italian 80s horror like these go far deeper than its pouffy hair and rotary phones might suggest, back to the innocent time when we were still too young to not be horrified at the sight of intestines being pulled out of a screaming Tom Savini. Every slow walk through a darkened hallway was once fraught with a gut-tingle anxiety. We needed to be able to sneer at the fakeness of the gore even as we needed to look away. 

Though allegedly billed as sequels to Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD movies, which were huge hits in Italy (and there called LA CASA -"the House"), both GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY have nothing much in common with Raimi's films except the presence of a house. But today both glow with a quaint air of cheap ambivalence, both generate a certain ominousness and even if they're just imitating Fulci's imitations of America's imitations of Argento's imitations of Bava, or imitating Sean Cunningham's imitation of John Carpenter, hey, the Italians like GHOSTHOUSE's director Umberto Lenzi imitate better than anyone, or at least cheaper.

And though the budgets be low they were shot on 35mm, and they look good. They are serving drive-in dream logic distance and graphic violence. Shit like this was ideal for the post-midnight 'last' film on the drive-in bill after something like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET IV or WAXWORK before coming straight to video... then to complete obscurity... gone and unmissed, unwanted for over two decades, But now, restored on Blu-ray in a double set from Shout... GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY demand your agog disbelief! 

Did anyone ever love them? Many have tried. All have failed.... so far.

Will you be the first, or wretch like the rest?  

 GHOSTHOUSE 

"La Casa III" (1988)
Dir Umberto Lenzi (As Humphrey Humbert)

*1/2

"Oh Paul... I saw death..."

Kids will be ghosts with clown dolls killing kids in late-80s Italian films set in 70s America--instead of just adults with axes and chainsawed because Poltergeist, and Nightmare on Elm Street had cleared away the tired slasher tropes, and Europe is a lot slower to change once it finds a style it likes. When I was in Buenos Aires in 2000 they were still dressing and acting like it was the 70s, and I loved it. So I accept that Lenzi thinks that in 1988 American' kids still give a shit about ham radios, or even CB radios for that matter, and are such good sports that when they hear someone screaming for help on one of the bands, you just know they have to triangulate the signal and rush, a few days later, to the rescue. In case, you know, the killer is really... really slow.

 Turns out, that message came from a deserted house where long ago an evil kid and her singing clown doll killed her parents. Now her ghost is down in the basement, killing anyone who ventures therein, including a diverse roster of good-natured hippie-punk squatters. The ham band join them and they all hang around the house like a mix of SUBURBIA squat and Scooby gang abandoned mine. Not sure why they feel so compelled to linger (we presume they have homes to go to, since they also have a cushy trailer, but you know how kids will be: they just hang out waiting for their creative deaths to find them. 

First up, naturally, is a fat black kid who is also a petty thief, and a freeloader: he hitches a ride, uses a skeleton hand for cheap shocks and pick-pocketing the kids who pick him up and basically shoves people out of the way to be the first to die. Maybe that's Ghosthouse's way of trying to "pass" as an American movie before that racist cliche became too glaring to ever use again. And hey, John Saxon shows up as the sheriff (see replies below for correction), vainly trying to make it better film. He tries to coax the kids to move on, albeit without success. Only Italians would think American suburban law enforcement would ever be nice enough to kids to actually ask them to stop trespassing on private property, then giving up with a chuckle and a sigh once the kids refuse. Even after they begin dying one by one, they feel compelled to linger, like the guests in Luis Bunel's EXTERMINATING ANGEL. It never occurs to them to even walk next door or drive away, or even drive down the block a bit, even though trespassing on private property is a crime (in America), and even they arrived in a still-working RV, and despite the cop's warnings that this isn't a legal, safe and community-oriented way to spend their weekend.

With the English dub, everyone but Saxon (who dubs his own lines, thank god) sounds like a semi-illiterate seventh grader doing a cold read at a junior high school audition while his lacrosse buddies snicker in the hallway. 

One quibble with either the sharpness of the transfer, the color grading or the way Italians overuse stage make-up of the time, the clarity of the HD Blu-ray image drains the lighting of nuanced skin color (if there was any) so we can see the thin color differentiation where the pancake make up line is around the base of their necks and the thin brush stroke marks of every foundation application, even on the men.. The result is the impression the entire cast has been living in a basement for the past decade, or England, or in their third year of clown college (or some Weimar cabaret). Is it just the restoration, or part of a gambit to make Italian actors look more Nordic (as in their general obsession with red hair, or if it's the color grading (1). Either way the cumulative effect is... demoralizing.

But there's joy in GHOSTHOUSE's many little life-affirming accidental Brechtian details, like the shot of a hand swinging a hammer down into a guy's forehead. The swing downward is held just a few frames too long in the editing so we see the hammer slow to a stop an inch from the victim's forehead before the quick mismatched jump cut to said hammer buried in his suddenly thicker (padded) and darker-hued forehead (the painted-on latex skin color doesn't match). I love this kind of thing as Lenzi's effect crew use the the same camera and effects tricks my buddy Alan and I used in our old super 8mm epics, and I find comfort in knowing we did it better, or maybe since our image wasn't HD, it just looked cleaner. Certainly our editing was better. Anyone can make a decent cut between the axe swinging down and the effect of the axe in the head so that it looks real. Only someone with no idea what they're doing, or a Brechtian like Godard, would leave the frames where we see the axe stop right before it hits the actor's head. But I'm so glad it's there. Without it, the scene would just be another lame murder with bad latex effects instead of a little life-affirming incident (fake death keeps real death at bay).

Finally, as GHOSTHOUSE lumbers towards its required 90-95 minute mark, all the "best kills" come tumbling out. One kid drowns in a boiling lake of skull-sprinkled cream-of-wheat under the basement floor as a cheap great din of 80s SUSPIRIA-ism howls in the bones of the soundtrack. The little sister is cut in half at the waist; a kid is diced up by a fan blade; blood comes out of the sink. There's even ghost doberman like in THE OMEN (though I like to think it's from FACE OF MARBLE). The clown doll is too similar to the one in POLTERGEIST and the ghost girl too similar to the one in KILL BABY KILL. But the scenes of graveyards and old tombs recall all the touchstones of the Fulci and Argento canons. John Saxon is always playing sheriffs, but he always elevates.  It's crap, but it's priceless... crap, And the Blu-ray comes with....

WITCHERY 

"La Casa IV"
(1988) Dir Fabrizio Laurenti (as Martin Newlin)
*

WITCHERY is both much worse than GHOSTHOUSE as far as unrealistic yet nauseating prolonged gore / torture scenes, but better as far as far as cast and writing, with several recognizable American movie faces and a theoretically understandable reason for hanging around an unoccupied murder house while everyone is being picked off (they're stranded on an island due to an alleged off-camera storm).

 Linda Blair is a pregnant lady looking to buy or sell a very old abandoned seaside island hotel --its gray shingles flap in the ocean wind most atmospherically. Pouty Catherine Hickland plays a virgin grad student squatting there while writing her term paper on the 'witch light' that has regularly appeared out of the window throughout the building's early colonial American history and up to this very day! Hickland's then-real life husband David Hasselhoff is her sexually frustrated boyfriend/photographer, forever pressuring her to yield unto his desire, but her grimoire asserts "virginity can be a virtue and not the barrier that separates innocence from knowledge." Touche! He can't argue with that, though he knows it's really her all-consuming fear of penetration, and he can't argue with that either. She has this great slurred drowsy way with a line, like she spent the whole shoot on Valium, and who could blame her? Her imdb.com page notes that after her acting career she became a professional hypnotist, which makes perfect sense considering the pulse-slowing alpha wave-inducing speaking pattern. 

Even so, we feel for the horny Hasselhoff. Why does he stay around? Dost he not know how Hoff he art!? There's other fish in the sea, and what a rod and bait box he surely packeth.  

If only we stayed with this pair and their push me-pull you but stay respectful sexual thing, the film might not be such a drag. If it did that and cut the grotesque yet unconvincing torture scenes down to a manageable length, it might even be watchable. As it is, WITCHERY is brilliantly summarized in Leonard Maltin's Film Guide as "uncomfortable."

I don't mind a certain level of gross-outs, but the victims here get sucked into some kind of sub-basement Middle Age horse barn Hell, consisting of a row of horse stalls that have been converted into an alternate dimension Hell by doing... exactly... nothing to them. They don't even remove the straw. But who needs webs and chains and flames and damned soul when your stable has mocking old pilgrim-cum-carny geek lady and deranged Pagan-looking old man, straight out of a Bruegel painting (those tacky white hoods!), reaching out through the horse stall slots as victims try to pass by, laughing and gibbering like caffeinated mental patients at a Jaycees haunted house for charity? I do. 

After enough suffering, we begin to learn that each victim stranded on the island is there because they are needed for a stern German witch's spell (the one with the witch light!) - each death is an invocation of one of the seven deadly sins in some vague way, so they suffer suitable stable-set punishments: for the pregnant Linda Blair, the Bruegel painting old lady and Satan (not even horns) fight over, and then eat, a premature (very fake-looking) newborn baby. In one prolonged, grotesque scene, the bossy Jewish mother real estate mogul gets her nails broken off, her lips sewn together--a terrible appliance job and we see almost the entire process of sewing all across the mouth, as if the producers were sure they'd have to edit it down (2). She's then is hung upside down in the chimney as the rest of the survivors unwittingly start a fire right under her hanging head and since her mouth is sewn shut they can't hear her screaming as her hair goes up in flames. Oh the humanity! Hickland the virgin is--in the most vile sequence--raped by a sickly youth with sewn-shut lips (what's with the lips thing, Fabrizio?) while the old lady and Satan hold her down -- Yeccch!! Thank 'god' then that Linda Blair's hair gets wild once she's inescapably possessed by the devil, and there's the old classic of when the nympho real estate girl starts seducing the Matthew Broderick-ish dweeb real estate guy in a room with a big mounted swordfish on the wall.... wait for it..... 

Maybe I ate too much of something or other while watching, but I came away from WITCHERY with little but a lingering nausea. I think the film may have been seeking the kind of kinky equilibrium of Clive Barker, whose HELLRAISER was a big horror hit the previous year. But Barker would be too outrageous and creative to let the nausea and ennui take hold. In the Barkerverse you understood the difference between both dimensions (the pinheads' S&M club and tawdry Britain) and felt they were both real, even if just dreams in each other's spaces (the pain/pleasure trip was more or less theoretical). But in WITCHERY, there is no difference, and both feel false. In Barker, the mutilated masochistic demons are trippy and funny. Here, they're 'uncomfortable.' And the latex effects are betrayed by the clarity of HD Blu-ray, making them less shocking and more like arts and crafts. 

There are things I like about WITCHERY though, despite all that.  I like the foreboding sense of isolation, with the eerie wind and dim lapping waves. I like that no one dares take a boat out from the mainland to rescue them, because the ocean is allegedly so choppy from a coming storm, like this is some kind of lost zone off I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING Scotland where everything seems tranquil but nothing is. Take their word for it. Even if you can see the shore from the island. I've had dreams like that. I get it. 

No amount of witchery can made that lipstick color and thick eyeliner work
anything but woe on all who gaze herein

As the seven hundred year-old witch lady mastermind of the murders, Hildegard Knef (left) is hit and mess. In general she reminds us there's a dispriting abrasive flipside to the unflinchingly carnal allure of Germanic lady icons, In specifics, her terrible make-up choices remind us of how some things are never meant for HD, such as old person skin when caked in too much bright oily white make-up, the smell of bad perfume over 'old person' mustiness that evokes slogging one's way through a tedious 'party' at your unfun grandma's. Torture all you want, but in truth it's Knef's black eyeliner and the garish horror of her orange lipstick that are the real horrors of WHITCHERY.

Knef in the 50s - nicely unadorned

Maybe my reaction towards Knef (L'ATLANTIDE) reminds me of my stern and disapproving late German grandfather. Old Germans, man, are the worst - somehow more decadent than any French libertine yet so joyless about it you become a conservative almost instinctively. Their favorite thing is to torture their grandchildren with endless long lunches and dinners und schwarzwaldkuchen. Hours and hours with nothing to do but try to understand their wearingly adult conversation, as the only book or magazine they have in their Apple Canyon cottage is a Reader's Digest from 20 years ago, and the only game in the rec room closet some 1000 piece puzzle of a dull landscape. So one endures a full week of being bored near to death, minutes stretching like years, hushed constantly as children aren't heard, symbolic lips sewn-shut.. waiting as lunch turns to dinner and dinner turns to drinks (which you can't have - you're too young) Being crucified upside down, stabbed with a swordfish and set on fire is an indulgent luxury by comparison...

Long azzits annalog.

NOTES:

1. Italian fondness for red hair in cinema means lots terrible red-on-black hair dye or bad wigs on people who could never in a thousand years pass as Irish, the hot sun melting their brown bronzer intro rivulets of opaque desert sweat (as in the grotesque McBain family wiped out by Fonda in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

2.so they do what so many directors do, add about 20 seconds more gore than they really want, so they can begrudgingly remove it at the censors behest, thus satisfying both of their power trips and ending up right where the director wanted it to begin with (but then if the censors don't say anything, viola- way too much to the point it loses its blunt force impact)

Aussies gone Wild is Redundant: WYRMWOOD,THE ROVER

Horror festival favorite knockabout labor of love Aussie debut of brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner, WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014) kicks off already at risk of becoming a bit too WALKING DEAD meets ballsy-wallsy Aussie dingo-aitcha-baby macho, with so much wobbly-booted whiplash camera movement, slow-mo blood splatter, mud flecks, grime streaks, diesel oil drips and spray paint (both dried and glistening) coating every makeshift black spray-painted football pad surface that pretty soon a little spot of cleanliness would go a long way, even if just for contrast. At times, with nary a wowser to bounce shit offa there's a bit too-much macabre laddie deadpan humor, but it all eventually locks into place and, once the momentum hits, you're thrice-buckled to the boosted ute, mate.

The main focal character point getting off the ground is Barrie (Jay Gallagher) who loses wife and child to the outbreak of contagious 21 Days Later-style madness early on, in a great 'fleeing in the middle of the night' sequence (you don't have to get bitten to turn monstro, but it helps). Meanwhile Barrie's twin sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) is busy in her art studio/garage in the wilds of wherever, spray painting a punkette pal when the contagion hits, and she and n Barrie--somehow genetically immune--spend most of the movie trying to find each other, a bit like the Gish sisters in ORPHANS OF THE STORM, but with one of them garnering--not a handsomely-headed French aristo--but telepathic ability to control the zombies, this thanks to inhuman medical experiments performed on her by a creepy dude in a yellow rain slicker hazmat suit inside a big truck trailer lab. If you're instantly reminded of Virginia Leith's head in THE THING THAT WOULDN'T DIE bonding with the unseen monster in the closet ("I am only a head, and you are whatever we are, but together we're strong!!") then you're a weirdo with a lifelong telepathic connection to the classics.

It's all well and gritty, but there's so much Pollack-ish overlapped grime layers to every surface it makes THE PROPOSITION seem like THX 1138. To be endured as well is the sadistic chod chaining Brooke up in back of his weird portable HOSTEL-esque truck, all rapey-vibed, but then just sucking brains out of her neighbors, etc. Just inconveniencing her would have been enough justification for his rending as far as I'm concerned, 'cuz Brooke rocks. You can read tomes of savagery switchpoint courage in her heavy eye liner-blackened thousand-yard ESP stare, and her big Zoë Bell-on-a-Dodge Challenger moment is one of the highlights of the junk cinema year. Not nearly enough aggro bingles, boosted cars smashing through the center of caravans in slow motion, or servo fireballs to warrant the ROAD WARRIOR comparison but that's okay. Just walk away. 

So what we're left with, then is more NIGHT OF THE COMET or old AIP-Corman budget-masking trickery, i.e. you imply the zombie attacks from other films are taking place at the same time your own movie is going on, subliminally drinking their big budget special effects milkshake. But I ain't whingin'. I'd rather WYRM be AIP-COMET honest than simply packed with CGI macro-calamity adding up to nothing, loudly. Plus: the whole doing experiments with the brains and blood of the immune and its cool jet black humor superhero side effect of the damned, centering on Brooke's torturously slow race against time trying to telepathically control tied up zombies into patiently cutting their way out of their straps and then doing hers, is all genuinely new to the genre, commenting perhaps on the nature of video games (as in learning the tricks of the controls) rather than just trying duplicate them, i.e. to duplicate movies based on games that were trying to duplicate movies in the first place, like RESIDENT EVIL, themselves copies of earlier movies, and down the rabbit hole until we're back at square one, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and then before that, the terror of children worrying their dad will turn into a monster again once he spends half his paycheck at the local tavern, like a Jekyll/Hyde fundamental human split we all still carry like an archaic memory of the days before we learned how to start our own fires.



And then, just when it was getting so badass, it's over. Needing perhaps more crowdfunding to continue on into sequels. Well they should get it, as this WYRM may digest the same sources as all the other Romero-zombie rips but it spews some interesting mutations and manages to do quite a lot with actually very little, thanks to committed performances and Michael Lira's 'Stravinsky meets the Cramps at a John Zorn junkyard' score. I kept hoping for a didgeridoo in there, all low and alien and mean and maybe processed through flanger --it didn't come, but I still liked WYRMWOOD. So give it a squizz when yakka's got you stonkered and you need to rip a rollie and coldie, whatever that means. Shout's Blu-ray has an insightful Turner-Roache commentary, deleted scenes, and an array of helpful suggestions for doing your own damn movie--crowdfunding trailers, pitch meetings--a great little crash course in using social media to get your scrappy little horror-action movie off the ground. But more importantly, the Blu-ray has a full bore kickass stereo mix all but screaming for max volume and/or kickass headphones when the rest of the household is in bed, at peace, or at least fastened securely.

And the movie itself... ah yes, what is it the Aussies say about a nice buzz and low expectations? Nothing - because it's such a natural state for them they don't know any other way. And that is just one reason why we still love them, despite everything... by which I mean Yahoo Serious.

THE ROVER

(2014) Dir David Michôd

**

Ozploitation films set in the endless miles of Australia's interior, the harsh, alien, truly strange Outback, have--beginning in American minds with MAD MAX and CROCODILE DUNDEE and cumulating in the torturous WOLF CREEK--left many of us in the States terrified of ever going farther away than a few miles from the coast should we ever visit (and not too deep in the ocean either, cuzza shahks).  The Outback seems like a kind of apocalypse vanguard, a sampler of the future breakdown. Inhospitable and strange, its alien landscape sucks in whole swaths of 19th century schoolgirls, alien cities, floods, Colonial children following Aborigine kids on walkabout and outdoorsy killers. Everything runs wild there, and insufficient petrol reserves or manpower to police and power the whole damn wasteland area keeps it as lawless as a pre-Earp Tombstone. A movie so grimy it makes WYRMWOOD seem clean, THE ROVER is set in some near future where gas, guns, and cars are worth killing to steal, and the best the cops can do is lumber along down the endless highways in the direction of the criminals, driving through the parking lots of any motels along the way, occasionally shooting someone or getting shot in turn. Why do they even bother?

Robert Pattinson plays a contorted half-starved young snot who for some reason rocks a Southern (as in the USA) accent and hooks up with a John Lurie-esquely taciturn rogue (Guy Peace) who has such a homicidal fixation on recovering his stolen car that you just know some Iowa State Quarterly-esque twist is coming. The film's seedy impoverished mise-en-scene suffers from being too earnest and downbeat, ala THE ROAD rather than THE ROAD WARRIOR and what's worse, this collapsing civilization works by some seriously inconsistent rules. A small arms dealer is dumb enough to take a lone wild-eyed customer to a secluded room, hand him a gun and ammo and then tell said nutball to give the gun and ammo back if he can't pay. Another man wisely works behind thick walls with automat-style sliding doors for items bought, but when the nominal heroes need gas, he sells them a five gallon jug, which should be about enough to get them just smack dab in the middle of nowhere before they run out again. How these guys ever keep these vehicles going over these vast distances on gas cans designed to hold no more than a few gallons seems a little vague --I wouldn't care but they're trying so hard to be realistic, though why I do not know. Out here in the perimeter there are no hospitals or AAA. A person could die by hitting his head on a rock after diving in a lake, and only Toni Collette would ever know you loved her (as in JAPANESE STORY). That's why we're at the movies, mate, to get away from dispiriting neorealist squalor of this nature, not get our noses rubbed in it.

Pattinson, hair cut lice inspection short, is one weird little freak here, and almost makes up the difference. His whole body taught and lean and crouched like his hamstrings were all shortened by a sadistic Gepetto, a runt of a litter born hunched up to deflect kicks, his big T-shirt barely fitting over his lanky, underfed trunk. But to me his role here is one more link in the chain that will one day show modern naysayers that--like his TWILIGHT co-star Kristen Stewart--he is one of the more underrated actors of his or any generation. Not that this makes THE ROVER any more pleasant of an experience. You know that moldy smell some old cars get, like a tent left too long rolled up in the basement? That dirty, moldy smell? Well, the whole damn movie smells that way. It's the most malodorous film I've "seen" since the recent Blu-ray of CONVOY, which also carried the gross sulphuric tang of hot asphalt and dust, diesel gas exhaust hanging breezeless alongside moldy naugahyde and motor oil.

If that's what good literature does, make me smell things I moved to NYC to escape, prithee, Mr. Michôd, to what end? There was never a doubt why the MAD MAX movies existed: for drive-in thrills. But whither our ROVER? For a few weird twists that would seem interesting only to someone who's too trusting of their grad school fiction teacher's opinion, afraid of admitting their own un-PC urges? Better there be a red-tinted desert /shotgun firing / ancient cinema flooded-with-sand odyssey like in John Stanley's DUST DEVIL (set in South Africa, but the vibe's the same) 'cuz it at least has a hot chick, tantric voodoo sex, and some metaphysical weirdness underneath the sand and blood surface. Whadda we got in ROVER? Just the kind of moody third-act character reversals that make Sundance screenwriting workshops roll over and play dead.

But one thing Australia did right, mate, was old Croc Dundee. The Jack Burton of the Outback. And if you go to the land down under where women  snow and men thunder, and they ask about me, how's old Erich the Rah-Shmerick doin', or what's Erich into these days, you tell 'em he's hunky doro and preaching the Crocodile Dundee (also Burt Reynolds) non-duality approach to self-defense in the face of evil, a philosophy that might have spared Billy Jack, Sgt. York, Luke Skywalker, The Quiet Man, and all those other game-as-Ned Kelly but pacifist dubbos a lot of soul-searching. Croc teaches that even going lemony berko on some shickered yobbo can go fair dinkum... by which I mean, the man beyond duality does everything with love, even a knockabout blue with a big smoke bounce. Just avoid wallies... in any language. Their mundanity reduces even the grimiest bonzo philosophy to a grandma souvenir-ready T-shirt platitude and crossing guard coloring book tie-in. If you doubt, just ask the Men at Work to make you a vegemite sandwich, and take cover.  

The New Triple Long Pig Dare Ya: SHARKNADO 3, CHOPPING MALL

I was shocked watching SHARKNADO 3, which premiered with much Shark Week-esque hooplah on Syfy last week, when one of the "live tweets" mentioned "the theme park worker" and not the Universal Orlando Theme Park worker, which is really doing your promotional tie-in guy wrong. Meanwhile a commercial commemorates one of the recently eaten Secret Service guys, saluting him for being free at last from his wearisome cellular contract. Hey, that's clever, taking a chummy cue from Shark Week's many tie-ins over on Discovery. Aye, a fine example of synergy and vertical integration, albeit offset by the instantly-dated subtitle: "Oh hell no!" White people are now so crazy about that phrase. It's right up there with "let's do this" the white version of "lets do dis." Can using words like "clutch," and "baller" be far behind, yo? "Try the new, super- ill sausage and baller bacon butter triple hog dare ya from Applebees" Dave and Busters new Holla Back Baller Rack: 15 ribs for fifteen bucks" or "Patron Blue Tequila - Clutch... simply clutch."

The Sharknado series is the biggest hit yet to come from the latest Corman offshoot company joint Asylum. The producers realized they had a great high concept idea and so decided to spend a little more money and do it better than the usual wretchedness. Thus, SHARKNADO the First delivered the same sort of kitschy but solid thrill vehicle Corman had been parking on drive-in and TV screens across the country all through the 50s-70s and late night cable all through the 80s, and VHS rentals all through the 90s. And lately, for SyFy, he's been in the shadows behind a new self-aware camp golden age (if you don't take too much umbrage at crappy CGI). Usuing the 'nado as a springboard, Asylum has left their tackier jungle-based giant pythons and crocodile-octopus combos behind and gone for a slightly more upscale approach and garnered a great Twitter spike. The result, by the third one there's enough onboard for Synergy tie-ins to make Roger and Julie very happy.

Because hey, you can never have too many clever ad men tying in their lures on this big air shark wrangle, because every time there's a self-aware camp 'event' like this, the self-aware metatextually hip tie-ins become closer and closer to the actual movie until the two are tangled as two fishing lines. The result makes for quite a spectacle, as watching America eat itself always is, even as it eats you from the toes up, until all that's left is a finger on the remote.

Such faux-self deprecating product placement and tie-in integration is all over the net, and even on NBC's Saturday Night Live, which does Amex commercials in the same manner as their satiric commercial sketches, making the two impossible to separate. In other words, vertical integration is no mere Jack Donaughey 30 ROCK joke. Check out this Clickhole ad's deadpan mix of satire and straight forward advertising... where does one end and the other begin? Exactly.

That's why the second SHARKNADO was so painful: it had become fully self-aware and was just camping it up, shitshow-style, featuring a string of bloated once-familiar faces hoping to up their Twitter numbers before they're eaten or crushed by the severed head of the Statue of Liberty; and Fin's hero complex looking dangerously close to domestic terrorism (See Micro-Manager Munchausen) eagerly buying the ingredients to plastic explosives from various deli workers. They forgot it wasn't just the tornado that was interesting, but the incoming tidal surge that flooded the drainage sewers and left the water line climbing up into the Hollywood Hills. The way it all unfolded over one long afternoon--starting in a Santa Monica beachfront bar and ending high above some strange air field next to a UVA rest home--and rode one long incoming wave, and the way it was all seen from behind wet SUV windows, and heard in the background FM radio news updates folded into the slap of the wipers as they crawled through the soggy traffic. There was the stabbing sharks with your pool cue as they come rolling in through the bar window; the green table felt soaked in blood and saltwater; the traffic inland, stalled out on shoulders getting dumped on from upper exit ramps; the sharks in swimming pools; the sharks sliding down the highway strips; cars waiting for wave intervals to dash past off-ramp intersections; the way normal life seemed to go on simultaneously to the disasters --traffic is normal right outside on the highway--it all was analogous to the film's effect. It was exciting without trying to earn our respect, or to suspend our disbelief and sweep us into a magical realm. It was enough for SHARKNADO that we laughed once in awhile, and didn't reach for the remote.

Print the legend though - the Sharknado itself caught on, so did Ian Zetterling and Tara Reid. No one but me seems to remember the coolest parts: Nova with her crush and courage and USS Indianapolis-style backstory; the flooding aspect, the boozy bar-to-rainy car sense of afternoon drunk melancholy friendly belonging.

But time marches on, and the flood was probably harder to animate digitally than just having airborne sharks. And this tie-in bonanza is once-in-a-lifetime. I'm sure none of the subsequent airings will have those same ads, and it's a damn shame. 

But hey, Bo Derek plays Tara Reid's mom; and she's eternal like "She Who Must Be Obeyed", both of them dragging now-designated sharknado expert Fin to Orlando (for theme park tie-ins) instead of into the thick of the tornado, or helping the president prepare for the oncoming tide of inexplicable airborne sharks (the White House is destroyed; the mood is jovial). Reid's quite pregnant, their oldest son has "deployed" so isn't around; their cute daughter Claudia (Aubrey Peebles) is played by a different actress with dark hair (Ryan Newman), a subject of much small talk on Twitter. Now Fin and his family are public figures, America's designated sharknado chasers, with an Oval Office quick pass. Ever the hog of the first film's glory, Fin doesn't like that Cassie Scerbo's Nova spent the sequel off on her own (though I could swear I spotted her in the subway), going all storm chaser Mad Maxine without him, ensconced in an armored shark investigation camper with radar, arsenal, and contingency plan (Frankie Muniz is her lovelorn tech guy). Once again, Scerbo steals the show and bumps this back up to the old levels, giving her usual great raspy voice Jersey girl menthol-smoker realness, even to her manic obsessive psychospeak. When she says, for example, that when she crawled out of the shark in the climax of the first film: "it's never been the same," she does it with just enough gravitas to be neither turgid nor campy. It's just a junky-ass flick, but in this moment it shows you can address PTSD without being either dismissive or PSA maudlin. 

Cassie Scerbo, you are the heart and soul of these films and never let them tell you different! Tara Reid gets the name recognition but you provide the soul. Scerbo, your misguided love for Fin--who only has eyes for his family which of course makes you love him more--is the first film's true core. Not having you around in the second made it fairly trite going. Is there anything more unseemly than some Cali broheim lecturing us on what it means to be New Yorkers as he runs hither and yon, chasing his family around the all the usual sights (Times Square! Subway! Mets Stadium! Statue of Liberty! O00h-rah!) like a confused maniac terrorist-tourist hybrid? 

I don't even mind that Fin's still got the obsessive hero complex this 3rd time, because it fits the film's subtextual army recruitment propaganda and NRA promotion. Whenever gun nuts take the law into their own hands to save their neighborhoods from flying sharks, this movie proclaims, we all benefit. Michelle Bachman and Ann Coulter-- both of whom make cameos--especially benefit from this red state synergy. And of course NASCAR and military build-up must be acknowledged, and respected. Ooh-rah! UFC fighter Josh Barnett blasts sharks for the military--now more than ever. In the synergy ads, cosmetics come in real killer colors; and there's the usual incessant car insurance barrage "I guess they don't like you driving around on three wheels;" there's the smug girl chiding her husband with her good driving record cashback; Sam Jackson ranting about your 'hard-earned' cashback; the new Jeep Cherokee; the M. Night movie about creepy grandparents; Pepsi; for us in NYC a spate of local ads for: the Honda Summer Clearance Event, Broadway superstars of Magic "The Illusionists," and The Book of Mormon. Promos for Syfy's own latest 'scary critter+natural disaster' hybrid hop-on, "Lavalantula"; the upcoming Syfy miniseries Childhood's End which is about an alien invasion that brings happiness and peace but what's the downside? What are these peacenik aliens really up to? "I would rather the world go down in flames under our control," a staunch white male shouts "than live in prosperity and peace under theirs!" Spoken like a true Republican! "Messing with Sasquatch" promotes rude near-bullying taunts of Bigfoot in the name of jerky; turkey and guacamole (flavored substance) from Subway; Captain Obvious at Hotels.com ("They won't judge your life choices"); some guy with an unbearably pandering sensitive voiceover, the kind so common now, where they talk to you like you're five years-old and just skinned your knee:"All you need to see is the next 200 feel - that's how life unfolds - and you'll get there." (1) Fuck that. The badass anti-smoking ad equates a cigarette with a vicious science class monster, and that's so clutch. Anything that kills you makes you cool first. If Bogie's life taught as anything it's that real men don't do longevity.  

Subtextual pro-NRA ultra neoconservative Army recruitment tool or no, watching Tara Reid give birth while falling through Earth's atmosphere inside a giant flaming shark, Fin cutting a whole so the parachutes can get through, it's tough to stay mad at America. Reid's skin looks much better, by the way, than in previous episodes (did she read my dermatological recommendations?). And it's great to see Nova again, especially all militarized like that. I just hope the Syfy/Asylum brain trust wise up and give Nova her own local girl vs. shark series. She's that old animal flesh creeping back again, a thumb in the eye of the CGI Moreau! Second Amendment 4-Eva!

CHOPPING MALL (1986) on the other hand, came to me free of all commercials, liens and tie-ins. Seeing it (for the first time) last week after the NAD 3 was very satisfying. Why had I waited almost 30 years to get onboard the MALL train? The poster alone (at left) kept me away back in 1986, when I was still a young punk smoking his way through college. It looked like a cheap slasher film which by 1986 was one desiccated formula. I remember imagining some bloated, mentally challenged mall cashier chopping up and eating the long pig (you have to look close to see the hand holding bag is mechanical). 

Turns out, my imagination was wrong! I found out last week that it's a Corman-produced joint about mall security robots run amok after their control tower is struck freak lightning, the same night three young furniture store clerks and their dates, plus another couple, spend the night at the mall furniture store to (censored!). It's Corman underling Jim Wynorski's directorial debut and he'd go on to much worse things, I'd imagine (I'm too leary of adenoidal snarkiness, fat guy gross eating, frizzed out 80s hair and fake breasts to travel very far in his and fellow leerer Fred Olen-Ray's overall direction). But here, some initial snark and gross guy's eating aside (you can just skip that scene and be none the worse for wear), the all-in-a-single-night momentum keeps things pleasant and there are nice tracking shots, a good percolating synth score and genre in-jokes enough to make Joe Dante smile wanly at Forrest Ackerman's autograph. For example, the gun store in the mall is called "Peckinpah's"; the nerd shows his blind date ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS while everyone else gets it on (the kind of thing I used to do, alas, on dates - I'd even show them the same movie! Hmmm It's so painful to remember!); there are dialogue quotes from the original THING ("it's gonna be real mad when it gets to me") in a way that lets us know these two buddies have seen that film as man times as I have; one character tries to dispel robot attention by saying "Klaatu Barada Nikto and the robot lasers borrow sound effects form the 1954 WAR OF THE WORLDS. Corman company movie posters adorn the pizza shop walls; Mary Woronov and Paul Blartel roll their eyes during the robot debut ceremony (with plenty of ROBOCOP allusions); Corman regular Dick Miller is a cranky custodian. Sure, the acting veers all over the place, especially the half-hearted screams of the usually great Crampton (she just looks great this time), but that just adds to the ramshackle verite... Teenagers, man, who the hell knows how they'd handle being, as one character says, by way of apology for her skittishness, "chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots?"  

As with all Corman and Co's output, there's the realization no one wants to see 'real' acting, so we can eschew the seven stages of grief which pretentious writers and actors so often mistake for realism or importance (that so deaden THE MIST, for example), and go right to the savagery switchpoint. Even the designated strapping jock type Mike (the beloved John Terlesky of DEATHSTALKER 2) has good-natured charisma rather than Cruisian narcissism; the nerdy blind date's a crack shot (Kelli Maroney, who was in the excellent NIGHT OF THE COMET--which I did see in the theater); and the sexy older girl (Karrie Emerson) is an ace mechanic. Rather than sobbing and whining, the girls make bombs with cans of gas and protect each other's flanks. Sultry Crampton does a half-assed job but doesn't last long enough to be a bother and adds natural sex appeal. The robots are real-size, genuinely remote-controlled full scale maniacs on real tank treads, whizzing up and down the real mall halls (they filmed after-hours like Romero with DAWN). The robots are GOG-esque, with Gort laser eyes, and Robocop-style platitudes--a combination way cooler than you'd expect for such a low budge endeavor with such an ROTM poster.

To tie in SHARKNADO, Wynorski's currently working on something called SHARKANSAS WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE.  Dominique Swain and Traci Lords will star. I will certainly watch it... probably not. Wynorski is very hit and miss for me, mostly miss. But I do like DEATHSTALKER 2, and CHOPPING MALL, as it doesn't just source from TERMINATOR but from TERMINATOR's own sources, and it achieves the rarest of all hat tricks in this genre: self-aware intertextual wit that never descends into campy disdain for its own genre. After all, it was Roger Corman's 50s sci-fi films that inspired THE TERMINATOR (James Cameron even got his start working for Corman) which led to CHOPPING MALL, which weaves that thread to a separate strand of suburban amok consumerist satire for a weave that's pure New World schlock.

Just as the recent masterpiece IT FOLLOWS did, CHOPPING MALL knows that great horror begins at home, not in some idyllic small town or some decayed inner city but in the real normal middle class suburbs, the mall, and home by our theater-killing TV sets. Anywhere we go to feel safe, or sated, or comforted is-- in the perfect horror film-- used against us. America has always been and will always be slightly paranoid. It's only natural that any oases we create to escape from danger would itself one day try to kill us. 

It's a chip off the old block that way. 

Aside from swatting a fly or two we need never kill things anymore, in real life: we seldom even kill our own food. But our animal DNA has us nonetheless hardwired for hardship --it releases that special dopamine reward only on special occasions that mark our---and therefore its--continued triumph over adversity. When we kill our own meat through some savage effort, or start and maintain a camp fire, or vanquish our foes in physical combat, it gives us the exultation dopa jackpot. Without those kind of basic challenges, those dopamine chemicals gradually tone way down. When a good movie taps those instincts, we get a little taste, but as for real life dopamine-flood primal caveman victories, what's left? 

Sex, procreation, maybe kickboxing-- all mere scraps compared to the staggering endorphin rush we'd once get after killing a saber-toothed tiger with nothing but a sharpened rock while weak from near starvation, then cooking and eating it with the tribe...

Goofy but sufficiently deadpan horror movies like CHOPPING MALL and SHARKNADO tap into this exhilaration even as they expose its utter ridiculousness. They clarify the answer to why we create our own artificial calamities, the endless disaster movies and evil adversaries, and why advertisers take advantage of this need for endorphin stimuli, which is why the shark eating you will soon be financially obligated to remind you about the new Applebee's shrimp platter (it comes with an all you-can-eat salad buffet!) Don't ask why this great white eating machine is so eager for you to clean your insides out with good ruffage, you may learn things about your current nutritional value that you're better off ignoring. Isn't it fortunate Syfy offers the perfect distraction?



NOTES:
1. My voiceover career stalled out when clients stopped wanting the deep Tom Waits rasp and moving towards that touchy feely "high" voiced food co-op nonsmoking smug sensitivity in my voice so I may be prejudiced, but fuck that namby-pamby shit. Love.... it's what makes a Suburu a Suburu,... fuck that guy. When a Corona gets its lime, you can kiss my white ex-smoker asszzz. 
2. I literally watched that movie last week, and at his age had the same shy boy trouble busting first moves. I'd show them weird old movies til they'd either get tired and leave or throw themselves at me. But that was before... the meds. Now I'm all cured. Too late though - the Cialis giveth and the SSRIs take away