Nightmares (1980) dir. John D. Lamond

a.k.a. Stagefright

Logline: The cast of a pretentious theatrical farce are being picked off by a killer with an affection for pointy shards of broken glass. When all is said and done and the bodies are cleared from the stage, Melbourne's theater community will never be the same. The quips, at any rate, will be much less pithy.

Crime in the Past: Imagine seeing your mother have sex with a man who is not your father on January 26th, 1963. Then imagine, on February 23rd of that same year, seeing your mom felt up by that same man in the front seat of a car after you wake up from being asleep in the back. Upset, you might then inadvertently cause the car to crash, sending your mother flying partially through the windshield. Seeing your mother in physical distress, you might then also give her legs a few pulls, accidentally ripping her throat open and causing her to bleed to death in the process. Imagine then waking up hours later in the hospital and overhearing your father calling you a murderer. Imagine shortly thereafter being assaulted by a lascivious, pedophilic hospital orderly and saving yourself only by shoving a nearby shard of glass deep into his neck. Imagine all that, and you'd probably start stabbing random people with nearby shards of glass twenty years after the fact, too.

Bodycount: 11 budding thespians receive some career-killing reviews.

Themes/Moral Code: There is, for obviously traumatic reasons, the standard "sex = death" morality at play here. Seeing, as a youngster, her mother groped shortly before her bloody expiration, our demented serial murderess, Helen (Jenny Neumann), tends to associate the two bodily states. This association leads Helen to committing many acts of castration and the tearing of breasts with aid of pointy glass shards whenever she sees her co-stars getting randy behind the curtain. And, naturally, in the theatre community of Melbourne, everyone is sleeping with everyone on the sly, so Helen has much sin to vanquish (i.e. stab repeatedly). In fact, the film devotes a good amount of its running time (though perhaps not enough) to skewering the theatre scene. The theatre directors, actors, and critics we see parading about the film expressing ludicrously inflated senses of their own artistic import are good for some chuckles (they speak of their slapstick stage comedy about death in terms befitting Brecht), but ultimately one wishes the film had developed this notion further by tying it more closely to the motivations underlying its slasher plot. Sure,  by the film's conclusion Helen has risen in the ranks of Melbourne's crop of actors because the majority of her top competition is laid up in pieces at the morgue, but this seems more a fringe benefit of her psychopathy than a pointed jab at the ruthlessness of a corrupt and attention-hungry artistic community.

Killer's Motivation: Helen sees sex, then sees shards of glass conveniently nearby. Helen kills. Her choice of weapon is rooted in the early childhood trauma of inadvertently ripping her own mother's throat open with jagged shards of car windshield glass. This early act of violence was obviously accidental, but her devastated father's insistence in the hospital soon after the incident that she's a murderer appears to take hold of her vulnerable psyche: maybe, after all, she intended to kill her mother for her cheating ways, and maybe she can reenact the murder time and time again with her new victims and, by taking a deliberate roll in the murdering this time, fulfill her father's labeling of her. Maybe. The film inexplicably treats Helen's identity as the killer as a mystery throughout, in a storytelling choice akin to that made in a hypothetical episode of Scooby Doo that pretends that the only other person in the creepy, cobwebbed theater other than the Mystery Inc. gang couldn't possibly be a suspect responsible for the ghoul in the big rubber costume.

Final Girl: One of those rare instances in which our final girl is also our killer. Helen's mania finds her wandering around in a totally and obviously deranged state, constantly muttering in various voices to herself while in the general vicinity of others: one wonders if her oblivious cast mates simply mistake her for a dedicated method actor. Helen's psychological complications and sexual hang-ups have a certain simplicity to them for the most part (she's never had a boyfriend before, she's never been allowed to have a boyfriend before, she's plagued by memories of her dead mother having sex, and she's incapable of being touched, which also reminds her of her mother), but these personality quirks vanish after she's completed the bulk of her murdering, allowing her to have one spirited romp in the sack with her new sort-of boyfriend, Terry (Gary Sweet), before framing him for her crimes. One's mother-proxy-murdering work is never done.

Evaluation: An Aussie slasher that punctuates its many sequences of drawn-out wandering killer-POV with explicit close-ups of labia majora, Nightmares has something for everyone. What's a rather enjoyable but undeniably by-the-numbers slasher contains-- if you peel back the festering skin a bit-- some rather surprising bits of sleaziness. Besides the videographic lessons in female anatomy, viewers bear witness to genital mutilation, talk of a character's "big brown freckle," and a rather queasy scene in which a victim vomits all over himself while being attacked by the killer. These are unusual, if not entirely admirable, moments in a film so very typical in every other respect. Lead actress Jenny Neumann would go on to be more captivating as a severed head in slasher semi-gem Hell Night (1981) the very next year. Though worth the marginal experience it provides for the slasher devout, the film's most amusing moment arrives early, during its opening credits no less, when the text informs us that director John D. Lamond is being credited with the script's "original idea."

February 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of February, 2013

Though quite the understatement, it would be fair to say that I watch a few more horror films in any given month than I find the time to cover here on the blog. I began the blog almost a year ago with the intention of it being a screening diary, in which I hoped to more or less write about every horror film I watched. This was almost immediately stifling: not only was I forcing myself to write a developed entry about everything I happened to see (no matter how difficult or uninteresting that task may have been), but this dictum actually began to persuade me against watching as many horror films as I generally do, knowing that if I watched fifty or so horror movies in a month I'd feel that nagging compulsion in the back of my mind to write about them. The switch to monthly themes in the last half year or so of this blog's life has both given the blog a novel organizing principle and liberated me from the its initial mission.

Nevertheless, this decision has prevented a wealth of good (and execrable) films that I've been watching from being included here on the blog, so from here on out I'm going to split the difference by presenting a new monthly feature called Footstones. These Footstone entries will be the first of every month and will be a collection of brief-ish capsule commentaries on those odds and ends that I've watched but that didn't fit the previous month's theme. With any luck, these entries will soothe my writerly conscience and provide you, gentle reader, with some bite-sized thoughts for mastication.

For more capsule-shaped reading fun, make sure to check out my freshly published Favorite Film Discoveries of 2012 list over at Rupert Pupkin Speaks.

Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000) dir. John Ottman

Jamie Blanks's Urban Legend (1998), with its adoption of a clever but never cloying metanarrative, adherence to the bombastic and ludicrous tenor of slashers past, and utilization of Rebecca Gayheart's massive hair, rests unquestionably in the top tier of post-Scream slashers. John Ottman's follow-up can't claim the same heights. It's a decent entertainment, featuring likeable enough characters and some moderately cute (though ultimately underdeveloped) methods for connecting this followup to the first film. But its insane jumps in logic and storytelling (moves which felt organic in the first film) here seem overly calculated, as if they're missing the wit they think they possess (see: most of the jokes, the twin twist). Moreover, its film school setting is about as nauseating and false as such fictional depictions tend to be (see: resources as good as any Hollywood production and Joey Lawrence on his cellphone calling up his Tinseltown connects). It sounds like a snub to say that the best part of Final Cut is its closing credits, but if you've seen the film you'll understand: oh, what it could have been! Though I can't remember any compulsion to see it at the time (which is nearly unthinkable considering my affection for the first film), this sequel was not a direct-to-video release. It received a genuine theatrical run and even made a profit, though it only wound up taking in about half of the business that Blanks's film did. Indeed, a second sequel, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005), which breaks away from the series' slasher roots on a supernatural tangent (Hello, Mary Lou), was released direct-to-DVD. Maybe someday it will haunt my television set, but Final Cut didn't leave me champing at the bit for more.

Bait 3D (2012) dir. Kimble Rendall

Yet there was, to no surprise, much ch[o]mping in this Australian "Sharks in a Supermarket" flick. The concept does not stretch much further than that, nor would we want it to. (Though, a case could be made for it bravely venturing outside its comfort zone by also including a "Shark in a Parking Garage Beneath a Supermarket" subplot.) This is director Kimble Rendall's first film after careers in rock music and second-unit direction, and perhaps in consequence of this the film seems as if its been whittled from the creative hands of an entertainer rather than an artist or storyteller. It is, in a couple of words, idiotic fun. Bait 3D's melodramatic dialogue and broadly sketched characters often left me rolling in laughter. Admittedly, the shark action (the raison d'être for this sort of spectacle) is subpar, creating not a lick of genuine tension-- especially in contrast to another recent Australian shark attack flick, The Reef (2010)-- but one cannot help but admire the genuine enthusiasm with which the filmmakers approach their sublimely goofy scenario.

Shark Night 3D (2011) dir. David R. Ellis

I was quite thrilled with the insanity-fueled high Bait 3D had left me with, but I happened to be snowed in on this particular night so followed it up with this gem from the late, great schlockmeister David R. Ellis (helmer of the two best films in the Final Destination series, parts II and IV). The buzz I'd heard from folks upon its release was none too kind, with most harping on its neutered PG-13 style. But I wonder if those reviewers walked in biased because of the ludicrous pretense that PG-13 horror can never be good, because what's here (perhaps in spite of or maybe even because of its self-imposed restraint) is extremely entertaining. Such restraint forces the film to create appeal in its other aspects, which Shark Night does. The risk that runs with total gore freedom is dreck like Silent Night (2012) or even Piranha 3D (2010), the latter of which is a decent film but still rests on its "Gore is entertaining/funny, huh?" laurels and can't bother to be appealing otherwise. (Like, if this movie were made by the director of Silent Night the sharks would have slowly eaten Katharine McPhee's boobs for 10 minutes while Donal Logue poured beer on the wounds and belched.) Shark Night is blankly likeable characters doing silly things in a preposterous situation. I suppose a lot of its appeal for me is it's odd wholesomeness, which is a rare trait in the Grunge City that is '00s-'10s horror. I mean, just look at this. This is the kind of stupidity we need more of in this genre. The villains in Shark Night hate college kids so much that they decide to populate a salt-water lake with various species of sharks and feed said college kids to them so that they can then sell the footage they film of this chomping to the Discovery Channel for Shark Week. Fantastic.

Screamtime (1986) dir. Michael Armstrong & Stanley A. Long

First Maxim: Horror anthologies are intrinsically enjoyable viewing experiences-- a lousy segment or two won't prevent at least one of them from capturing your fancy. (Even the abysmal V/H/S (2012) managed not to disappoint on this count.) Second Maxim: British horror anthologies are best of all. (View all of the Amicus anthologies and then try to mount a counter-argument. You have been dared.) With these general truths in mind, I'm happy to report that Screamtime, a low-budget slasher-inflected British horror anthology from the mid-80s, is certainly a pleasure, if not particularly the strongest example of the form. Though its third and concluding segment (about some sentient killer garden gnomes) is a bit deficient in its execution, the first two segments (the first about the bloody family problems of a beleaguered Punch & Judy show proprietor; the second about a woman receiving disturbing visions of the future after moving into a new house) are excellent slices of thrill 'n' chill. The wraparound segment, about a couple of oafish thieves watching the pilfered segments on their VHS player only to find those segments' antagonists appear in reality, is as much of a flat note as it sounds, though it does provide us a brief but utterly tantalizing glimpse inside of a UK-based video store in the pre-Nasties 1980s. What we see: a veritable wonderland.

The Kindred (1987) dir. Stephen Carpenter & Jeffrey Obrow

The Kindred is one of the best (if not the best) low-budget/high concept/higher effort creature features ever forged, and it's a crime that it's not talked about more often. Part of the problem, one imagines, is its unfortunate relegated-to-VHS status, but allegedly Synapse Films has been formulating a long-gestating remedy to this issue that will hopefully come to pass one day soon. The Kindred boasts an elaborate pseudo-scientific premise that allows for much monster carnage, including (among its greatest hits) a tentacled creature living under the porch and a woman metamorphosing into a fish. The practical effects are as gooey as they are gorgeous, managing at times to be jaw-dropping in intensity and ambition. And the film doesn't settle for visual splendor alone: it also features a group of (relatively speaking) intelligent and mature scientist protagonists who are likeable enough that the film can't bring itself to kill them all. The Kindred is by the same writer/director team who, just a few years prior, assembled the wonderfully gory and grim college slasher The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982). As good as that earlier film is, The Kindred is leaps and bounds better in formulation and execution, foreshadowing great future genre efforts from this duo that (sadly) never came.

House of Dark Shadows (1970) dir. Dan Curtis

Walking into Dan Curtis's colorful big-screen adaptation of his own daytime black and white soap opera without being at all familiar with the source material was, I'd read in countless reviews, a mistake. The film necessarily condenses plotlines that ran for months on end over countless hours on television, and because of such takes some rather abrupt and jarring narrative leaps. Turns out, I adored House of Dark Shadows specifically because of its refusal to hold my hand while shifting through its dense array of characters and motivations. An astute viewer will have little trouble reconciling all of the film's bits and pieces, and will soon thrill to its sumptuous atmospheric pleasures and its refusal to slacken its mad dash to its gory finish line. This is an American Gothic in the grand and garish Hammer style, and anyone who cherishes that sort of spectacle knows how rare a bird it is. Thank you, Tim Burton, for making this film and its sequel's digital video debuts possible.

Night of Dark Shadows (1971) dir. Dan Curtis

The second Dark Shadows film, Night of Dark Shadows, features the notable absence of first film and series' star, Jonathan Frid, as the vampire Barnabas Collins. It instead features some later Collins descendants at the old Collinwood estate, dealing with seductive ghosts and witches. This does not at all feel like a step down in quality. Unlike House of Dark Shadows, Night is leisurely paced, and that's actually a benefit to its much less visceral concerns. Its manifestations of its haunting are occasionally more subtle than its soap opera origins would lead you to assume, and all the more effective for it. (Of special note in this regard is its wonderful final sequence, which plays for both subtlety and bombast one after the other and pulls off both with class.) Simultaneously, its emphasis on documenting a decaying domestic relationship feels much more in line with typical soap opera subject matter than House's opulent vampire drama, and becomes (as soap operas tend to) rather engrossing over its hour and a half running time. (I'd love to see its long-lost extended cut, which is said to be fuller and more coherent, though I had no trouble at all following or appreciating what was left after the editor put down his scissors.) Night reminded me, in many ways both broad and specific, of a film director Dan Curtis would soon direct, the Oliver Reed and Karen Black haunted house drama Burnt Offerings (1976). Perhaps the later film was an attempt to right the wrongs perpetrated on the former in the editing room? In any case, Curtis provided us two of the very best American-produced haunted house films in only five years back in the 1970s, and that's no small feat.

Death Ship (1980) dir. Alvin Rakoff

Death Ship isn't as good as its poster, but then that's a tough image to live up to. Nonetheless, it's a decent maritime thriller with an imposing haunted Nazi warship as its primary location. George Kennedy is his usual fantastic self as a beyond-cantakerous retiring ship captain who, upon shipwreck and ghostly possession, takes command of the titular ship and sets his fellow survivors up for blood sacrifice. No matter how you cut it, a haunted ship that runs (figuratively if not actually) on human blood is pretty nifty, and if the Nazi angle adds an exploitative angle to it all, well, all the better for this sort of venture. There's some decent horrific imagery (like when one of out heroes falls into a watery cargo hold full of decaying corpses) alongside equally clunky ones (a bloody shower is treated by its screeching recipient as The Most Horrific Thing of All Time while we scratch our heads). To its credit, Death Ship also prominently features two young children among its cast, and their performances (along with a recurring joke about how the little boy has a clearly defective bladder) somehow didn't inspire me to thunk my head repeatedly against the wall whenever they were on screen. So, kudos. The recent blu-ray release of the film from Scorpion Releasing is a fine one, with a rather sharp transfer and some fun supplementary materials.

The Video Dead (1987) dir. Robert Scott

Excellent mindless trash. Its perplexing central conceit (a haunted television set bound for a paranormal research institute winds up in a suburban home and begins spawning vain, life-envying zombies) is so earnestly accepted by the film's characters that, in its own non-logic, we actually come to accept it. The Video Dead knows that it's funny-- most of the time, at least-- and when it doesn't, as in the case of lead actor Rocky Duvall's gee-whiz performance, it's delectable for reasons of amateurish gung-ho. Its wonderful final act, in which our heroine plays housekeeper and hostess to our confused zombie horde in order to avoid being attacked, feels as if it would fit comfortably in Peter Jackson's early genre work. The Video Dead was released for the first time on a digital format in February by Scream Factory as one half of a monsters-in-the-television-centric blu-ray double feature, the other half being the glorious and long-sought-after Terrorvision (1986). To call this the release of the month would be a gross understatement: seeing these neglected films so lovingly preserved and supplemented is enough to warm the cockles of the most jaded of genre fans' hearts.

The Nest (1988) dir. Terence H. Winkless

Another Scream Factory release from last month was Terence H. Winkless's mutant roach flick The Nest. Before a delay of this release, I had scheduled myself to cover it during January's Nature's Grave feature here at the blog. The film fits snugly into the confines of the Animal Terror genre, sporting all the distinguishing features: reckless scientists, mutated wildlife, unconcerned/complicit local authorities, and a half-baked ecological message. Among its peers, it's an unremarkable effort, despite some occasional flashes of Slugs-level gory brilliance and the presence of the ever-adorable Lisa Langlois (who also starred in the much superior but equally scrappy killer rat flick, Deadly Eyes (1982)). Perhaps the film's biggest issue is how little screentime the cockroaches actually have. For a film explicitly about the insect's ick factor, more could have been gained by keeping their physiology grounded in quasi-reality (or maybe taking the exaggerated Creepshow (1982) approach) rather than by promising flesh-eating mutant roaches (see the above poster) that it can't deliver. We're gifted some nifty looking cat-roach and human-roach hybrids, but it says something that the film's best squirm-producing moment is one in which our protagonist fails to notice the roach swimming around in his coffee cup.

The Night Stalker (1972) dir. John Llewellyn Moxey & The Night Strangler (1973) dir. Dan Curtis

More Dan Curtis goodness in the form of two television movies that spawned a later abbreviated series. Kolchak, a perpetually down-on-his-luck crack investigative reporter, is a fabulous character, and Darren McGavin plays him with all the easy underdog charm that's required and then some. Besides the fun creature plots (a bit more interesting in The Night Strangler, with its inverted Frankensteinian overtones), the most enjoyable aspect of the films is Kolchak's explosive friendship with his weaselly editor, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland). The two are akin to an old bickering couple who can't seem to get rid of one another, despite the constant betrayals and disappointments. Considered together, the films are formulaic (they possess essentially identical plots, with different creatures and locations subbed in), but because it's such a satisfying formula it's difficult to complain about. (My understanding of the later Kolchak series is that it continues the basic formula established in these films, in essence creating the Monster of the Week plot adopted in-part by later series like The X-Files and Fringe.) My hope is to return to the world of Kolchak, and soon.

Dark Age (1987) dir. Arch Nicholson

Logline: After a rash of crocodile attacks in the Australian outback, a ranger and croc conservationist, Steve Harris (John Jarratt), is compelled to kill or capture the gigantic beast responsible in order to prevent the frightened and angry citizens from calling open season on all crocs.

Animal of Choice: A 30-foot-long ancient croc, who may also be the physical manifestation of the spirit of Australia's aboriginal population.

Thinking Ecologically: Though a much stronger film on the animal front, Dark Age isn't unconcerned with matters of ecology. Primarily, it questions the readiness with which the white men of Australia poach and slaughter the protected local crocodile population, which is valued by the indigenous people and, you know, the ecosystem. The oafish croc-killers (never glimpsed jumping into a boat without a beer can in one hand and a rifle in the other) are the real monsters, as we see them in one montage splattering the outback with croc innards to no end at all, nearly wiping out all of the creatures. Ranger Harris's superior at the preserve is more concerned that the Japanese contractors who wish to build condominiums in the area aren't spooked off than with perserving the crocs, blurting truly thick-headed lines like "I don't care if they go extinct" and "the only place for a thing like that is in a museum, stuffed." This nonsense is contrasted nicely with the aborigines and their harmonious co-existence with the giant croc, who they view as not a nuisance but an essential part of their environment and cultural heritage, worthy of respect and reverence. For them, killing the croc would be as devastating (symbolically and ecologically) as us killing all the bison of the American plains. Oh, wait...

Thinking About Animals: The about-face that Dark Age completes with regard to its looming crocodile menace is rather extraordinary. This is, after all, an animal that we watch, in lingering detail, slither through the water up to a crying human child in order to crunch his head between its jaws. How could this same beast become sympathetic and inspire us to fear for its safety? Harris offers a perfectly logical answer when he tells his lady friend that we "shouldn't judge [crocodiles] like humans. They don't know kids are taboo." A small child looks like a tasty snack to a 30-foot croc and there's really nothing unnatural about that, so why does this or any other human's death (especially when said humans were decidedly invading the croc's territory) necessitate the elimination of the crocodile? Again, the implicit superiority of humankind to all other animals is what's being expressed by all the characters rallying for the creature's demise: how dare a lowly crocodile presume to threaten humankind's lofty status. But the wonderful thing about this particular case is that Dark Age is in fact critiquing the presumption of anthropocentrism by making its adherents the obvious villains and arguing that a human-eating crocodile has as much of a right to life as any croc-blasting Australian drunkard (maybe even more so: the drunkard should know better).

The last half of the film pivots to a protracted and quite tense capture and rescue sequence, wherein Harris, his girlfriend, and a handful of aborigines attempt to transport the drugged croc to an isolated lake where the croc can live peacefully under aborigine supervision. What is most fascinating about this part of the film is how skillfully it demystifies the animal menace, transforming what we previously saw as a toothy monster into a vulnerable and sympathetic creature. As it lies on its belly in one of Harris's croc pens, groggily writhing around every once in a while under sedation, we realize it is both an animal to be feared but also one susceptible to harm and cruelty, if humans so choose. If humankind wishes to continue in its belief in our species being exceptional, Dark Age argues for us to be exceptional in our compassion for creatures both big and small.

Evaluation in Brief: Curiously, crocodiles were left out of the initial late '70s burst of Animal Terror flicks. Alligators had their go in 1980 with the hit NYC-set Alligator (1980), but crocs wouldn't get their fair share of the cinematic spotlight until late in the '80s with Dark Age and the two Italian-made Killer Crocodile films (1989-1990). One reason for this might be that filmmakers simply had to wait until special effects were advanced enough so as to make and film a convincing giant croc. (While much of Dark Age's croc action is rather incredible, some stray shots still find the croc resembling a stationary canoe). Some evidence for this might be the glut of monster crocodile films that bubbled to the surface around the new millennium and the advent of competent computer-generated imagery: Lake Placid (1999), Crocodile (2000), and the quintuplet that hit in 2007 (Lake Placid 2, Croc, Primeval, Rogue, and Black Water, the latter two of which I heartily recommend). Despite the obvious visual improvements made in those films of the more recent wave, Dark Age remains one of the most distinguished and responsible films of not only those featuring scaled quadrupeds, but of nearly all Animal Terror flicks. Imagine: a film in which the animal "monster" is not the villain, despite its man-munching, but an animal worth saving. Dark Age offers a perspective that is alien to the subgenre, and that makes it a refreshing viewing experience. That is also happens to be a decent film certainly doesn't hurt either. But it's a shame that Dark Age is an anomaly, rather than the norm.

Razorback (1984) dir. Russell Mulcahy

Logline: A gigantic razorback has been terrorizing the denizens of the Australian outback, decimating houses, stealing grandchildren, and scarfing down wives, with his existence only acknowledged by a few true believers. The husband (Gregory Harrison) of a North American reporter who was gobbled up by the mythical hog arrives down under to investigate and smells some wicked bacon cooking in the air.

Animal of Choice: A big ol' hog.

Thinking Ecologically: Ecological concerns are minimized in Razorback, if not dismissed outright. One native Australian laments, "these boars are eating us out of house and home," and we're informed that their newfound voracity is a result of an increasing illness among the population, but there's no chatter as to the sickness being human-made. By way of the efforts of the American investigative reporter (Judy Morris), there is some fleeting concern expressed over the wanton and widespread hunting of Australian wildlife for slaughterhouse processing, but the film evacuates any validity from her cause the minute she's devoured by the same wildlife that she has come to Australia to protect. The film's Australian landscape possesses a harsh beauty, but it's the beauty of nightmares. Razorback does not romanticize the land it sees as rotten, dangerous, and in need of bloody cleansing.

Thinking About Animals: The titular pig is monstrously sized-- as big as a hippo-- and unambiguously characterized as an insatiable and unstoppable demon. In the film's opening scene, he explodes through the wall of a house, stealing a child and leaving the decimated abode in flames. He appears suddenly and mysteriously in the night like some creature of legend, spooking the locals without ever confirming his own existence. And yet, in spite of the threat he poses, the film backs up the assertion that he's just a dumb animal. We're told that because boars have small brains and extremely basic central nervous systems, they only exist in one of two states: "dangerous or dead." This allows our big boar to take multiple gunshot and stab wounds and keep moving, but it also compels him to follow our clever hero down a conveyor belt at the slaughterhouse, tricking the pig into stampeding right into some whirring fan blades. The significance of the razorback dying by use of what essentially becomes an enormous meat grinder is not lost: the avenging spirit of the hunted Australian wildlife, exacting supernatural revenge against the human hunters for all of their cruelty in murdering kangaroos and boars, is converted down to a status that devalues the symbolic significance of his reign of terror. Pieces of meat.

Evaluation in Brief: Russell Mulchay was the premiere music video director of the 1980s, crafting numerous videos for Duran Duran, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Ultravox, and countless others. Heck, in directing the watershed video for The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," the first music video to be aired on MTV in 1981, one could claim that Mulcahy established the general tone and format of the next two decades of music videos. But then he made his first feature film, Razorback, in 1984 and it completely bombed at the box office (not even a $1 million return on a $5.5 million investment). He recovered his film career (if only momentarily) with the modest though enduring hit Highlander (1986), but his films never gained the critical or commercial acclaim that they perhaps should have. For one, Razorback is a fine film, composed with a mind towards atmosphere, suspense, and visual dynamics. Courtesy of Mulcahy and DP Dean Semler (who also worked, not coincidentally, on the second two Mad Max films), the sun-ravaged Australian landscape takes on a nearly hallucinatory feel at points, illuminating odd rock and land formations bathed in high contrast primary colors, as the razorback lurks just out of the camera's sight in the brush, perhaps himself a gruesome mirage. Razorback, for its intensity and the surety of its cinematic vision, is one worth tracking down.

Meltdown 04: Sequelthon (Part I)

Horror sequels are a tough subject to approach. I suppose the knee-jerk response would be: "ARRGH, FORGET SEQUELS." But I'm not so convinced. While it's true that the production of a sequel in the horror genre is almost always an unnecessary act, it's not as if every horror sequel has been a hunk of cinematic garbage. From my viewing experience, I'd separate the full range of horror sequels into two broad categories: those that more or less faithfully recreate or refine the pleasures of their predecessors (Friday the 13th Part II, Evil Dead 2, Paranormal Activity 2 & 3) and those that fly totally against the expectations established by earlier entries-- those "in-name-only" sequels (Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2). One approach isn't decidedly better than the other. (I'd rate all of those films listed above as being of roughly equivalent quality). With the former approach, the benefit is being able to improve upon a formula that may have been somewhat underdeveloped in the original film (in every aspect, Friday the 13th Part 2 is the superior film) or to simply discover new ways to relate that formula (tonally, Evil Dead 2 is a radically different film from its parent, though no less satisfying), but the risks are either creating an unabashed note-for-note retread or an uninspired failure. Those films that adhere to the latter approach, while generally containing the germ of mild originality, always run the risk of alienating fans of their series (who may simply desire more of the same) or creating some form of individual story that is hampered by its connection to the flagship title (through restrictions imposed in marketing or narrative).

I've enjoyed enough horror sequels to prevent me from condemning them outright. (Remakes and reboots, of course, are a totally different situation. Forget them). This noted, I haven't seen nearly as many of them as I'd like--especially those sequels of some of the flagship franchises of the '70s and '80s. In an attempt to rectify this regrettable chasm in my horror film experience, I viewed 18 sequels over three days. (This number actually bloomed to 19 films before all was said and done. Thanks, Ulli Lommel). It wasn't always a fun experience, but it helped produce probably the most intriguing and varied moviethon I've yet completed. So without too much more ado, here is the first installment of six recounting my cornea-scratching journey, featuring the talents of Fright Night Part II, The Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf, and The Howling 3: The Marsupials.

Fright Night Part II (1988) dir. Tommy Lee Wallace

Director Tommy Lee Wallace is probably more well known in horror as the director of sequels than as the creator of original properties. To his name he has a few notables: Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Vampires: Los Muertos, the screenplay for Amityville II: The Possession (which I'll be covering in Part 6 of this Sequelthon), and this one, Fright Night Part II. (He's also the man behind the miniseries adaptation Stephen King's IT, which ruined the life of every child who was lucky enough to behold it in 1990). While arguably a more consistent film in his career of continuations, Fright Night Part II is also a lesser effort, though not one totally devoid of some small charm.

In place of advancing the story of Charlie Brewster and Peter Vincent-- perhaps featuring them as a comical pair of fearless vampire killers attempting to juggle their mundane lives with slaying (i.e. Buffy)-- Wallace and Co. choose to hit the reset button, beginning with Charlie in a psychiatrist's office being convinced that vampires don't exist. The events of Fright Night were just a shared delusion, of course, so why not repeat them all here? It'll be exactly like we're seeing them for the second time, but somehow fresher this go-around. This bummer of a storytelling decision sets us up for what ends up as a basic carbon copy of the first film, wherein both Charlie and Peter are forced to awaken to the vampire menace threatening the stability of their simple lives. (Perplexing: even though this Peter Vincent begins the film believing in vampires and obsessed with finding them, he still needs to be convinced when Charlie starts having his suspicions. It's as if the film is hesitant to step outside of the exact beats present in the first film, at the expense of logic). It's a shame that this is the case; an early scene featuring Peter attempting to connect with Charlie through reminiscing over their previous slaying experience hints at the fun directions this could have sprouted in.

So we're given more of the same and yet it all winds up turning out somewhat less than. The breezy, seductive, neighborly appeal of Chris Sarandon's Jerry Dandridge is replaced by a group of Lost Boys outcasts (including Jon Gries and Brian Thompson, the psychopath from Cobra) led by Julie Carmen, as Dandridge's vampiric lil' sis. They never present the same sort of easy, insurmountable menace that Dandrige did, but the way they roller-skate through their scenes and participate in bowling montages certainly casts them as endearing. I noted that one of their early kill scenes looked like a piece of vampire performance art, and when the film later informed me that they are, in fact, vampire performance artists, my brain exploded. The initial entry's light humor is recreated here (evident in a scene wherein a psychiatrist vampire talks his slayer through the guilt of slaying). Plus, the practical effects are quite impressive at times (the vamps all expire with delicious gratuity and Jon Gries' vamp makeup approximates Coppola's furry WolfDrac several years before that film). It's unobjectionable, and for a horror sequel that's not a sin, if not quite a virtue.

The Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985) dir. Philippe Mora

On the spectrum of horror sequels outlined above, The Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf would fall firmly in the latter category, those "in-name-only" sequels, primarily due to the fact that it is insane. The film does make a clumsy attempt to continue the narrative of its predecessor (the ludicrous subtitle relates at least in part to the fact that the great Reb Brown (Yor, the Hunter from the Future) is supposed to be Dee Wallace's brother), but this is precisely where similarities end. The Howling 2 ventures into the realms of the quasi-mystical and fantastic, often favoring the presence of Sybil Danning in glowy Kryptonian threads shooting lightning from he fingertips while mouthing "AHHHH-WOOOO," over, y'know, werewolves.

In fact, as the film traverses the varied landscapes of Los Angeles ("The City of the Angels," some on-screen text helpfully informs us) to the Carpathian mountain region, it would be easy enough to forget that you're watching a werewolf film, if not for the occasional fuzzy orgy. Top-billed is (astonishingly) Christopher Lee, lending some of his old world respectablility and gravitas to a role that requires him to don a leather jacket and thin white sunglasses inside a New Wave rock club. While Lee sleepwalks through his role in a state of abject embarrassment, my attention was drawn to the aforementioned Reb Brown, who makes a convincing argument for an alteration of the subtitle to "Your Brother is an Idiot" by spouting out lines like this: "Us country boys know that when the varmints start knocking off the chickens, we start knocking off the varmints." Typically, there is little consistency or logic here. Every time we see a new werewolf it looks radically different from every previous werewolf (I've tried, and one of them can only be described, rather indelicately, as a "mouth-violating werebat").

Despite its incessant string of lunacies, there is only the faintest whiff of self-awareness wafting off of this much-too earnest heap, and I suppose that works in its favor-- I'd honestly be frightened if I were to discover that this film knew what it was doing. As it stands, it's hard not to dig with unabashed fervor the theme song as belted out by the band in the New Wave club (they have a keytar!). The closing credits reduce the film to a summary music video of the preceding events, featuring a brief shot of Sybil Danning ripping off her top that is repeated (by my count) 14 times (!). Arguably, this Greatest Hits compilation is the most coherent format the events of the film could have been presented in. I hate this movie/I love this movie.

The Howling 3: The Marsupials (1987) dir. Philippe Mora

I am a fool. It seemed unlikely, but I was fairly certain that The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf was as nutty as things would get during this moviethon, and yet I was so quickly proven wrong. Why would I have expected the director of The Howling 2 to infuse into his sequel to that film, The Howling 3: The Marsupials, even a modicum of similarity between them? How could I have anticipated, even faintly, the slightest uptick in quality? Incredibly, The Marsupials is more off-putting and squirm-inducing than its counterpart. Philippe Mora obviously grew as a filmmaker in the two intervening years; unfortunately, that growth only extended to giving werewolves pouches for their young.

This film shirks the previous mysticism and old world folklore in favor of exploring the scientific community's underground interest in werewolf phenomena, the government's desire to eradicate all lycanthropes, and the Australian film industry's decision to make cheap werewolf films. (Yes, it's true, we do have some self-awareness and reflexivity this go-around. Bizarrely, the intentionally corny meta werewolf films-within-the-film are of exactly the same quality and tenor as the film itself. Chew on that one for awhile). The Marsupials also expands the mythology of the werewolf (in a manner that of course totally conflicts with both previous sequels) while highlighting a local variety (in this case, the Australian marsupial werewolf). In consequence, this film features a prolonged werewolf pup birthing scene involving saliva, excessive body hair, and pouches. I'll link you to this picture and say no more about it, as I wouldn't wish to profane the beauty of creation. (In addition, as werewolf pups (or would they be called "joeys"?) age, they begin to look like creepier versions of the Podlings from The Dark Crystal). Oh, there are also some werewolf nuns, who at one point spoil a costume wrap party and at another giggle riotously while watching the broadcast of the Australian Academy Awards. Sure, why not.

It's a funny film, and most of the time it knows it. (Some choice dialogue snippets, utterly free of meaningless context: "I don't like home because my stepfather tried to rape me and he's a werewolf"; "COMPACT DISC. RAAARGH.") The problem (let's just assume there's only one, for sanity's sake) is that it also devolves into a relentless, corny slog whenever it gets the chance. It earnestly attempts to garner our sympathies for the plight of the werewolves, and contains swatches of rhetoric supporting Marsupial Rights. (For real. It is dedicated to the memory of the extinct Thylacine, Australia's long-gone carnivorous marsupial). In a bit near the end, the film sort of turns into a cockeyed rendition of Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout, our young heroes traversing the Australian outback aided by a trusty aboriginal guide, with the major difference being that in this film they're carrying around a baby that looks like this while attempting to escape an oppressive U.S. government looking to murder them. Having seen both of Mora's Howling films in a row, I have no choice but to assume that he is a madman. I hope he never gets better.

For next time: It's Alive 2: It Lives Again (1978), It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987), and Night of the Demons 2 (1994).