Tag Archives: Monster

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HOUSE (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Steve Miner

FEATURING: William Katt, George Wendt, , Kay Lenz, Mary Stavin

PLOT: Horror writer Roger Cobb moves into the house left to him by his aunt following her apparent suicide, only to find it infested by malevolent forces that challenge his biggest fears and anxieties.

Still from house (1985)

COMMENTS: Poor Roger is having a pretty rough go of it. His agent is eager for him to churn out the next big hit in his Stephen King-like career, but he’s got an awful case of writer’s block. Whyfor? Well, it might be the collapse of his marriage to a successful TV star, which itself is probably due to the mysterious disappearance of their son. (Roger’s repeated calls to the FBI and the CIA get no results.) And it could be the haunting memories of that time in Vietnam when the muscleman of the platoon saved Roger’s life and lost his own to some extras from a community theater production of Miss Saigon. Plus, his beloved aunt did just hang herself in the upstairs of her beautiful Victorian mansion, the very same place where his son went missing, and her ghost has turned up to say that it’s all the house’s fault. So naturally, Roger decides that very house is the perfect place to get out of his head and finally finish that wartime memoir (which he has titled, with all due vagueness, One Man’s Story). It quickly becomes obvious that this was not the best place for a distraction-free retreat: intrusive neighbors lurk outside , including the guy next door who ignores boundaries and the Scandinavian sexpot down the street who stops by to use the swimming pool unannounced. Meanwhile, the TV always seems to be airing his ex-wife’s show, and the walls are covered with his uncle’s hunting and fishing trophies and his aunt’s disturbing paintings. Honestly, it’s probably a relief when the monsters in the closet and the flying knives show up; at last, the man can focus.

As the description above should indicate, House has more plot than it knows what to do with, and that’s a shame, because when it settles down and focuses on one or two things, the film hits its stride. For example, after confronting a monster performing a grotesque parody of his ex-wife (one of the film’s excellently cartoony creature effects), Roger slips into a slapstick routine as he attempts to hide the beast’s body (and later, various pieces of said body) from the police. A perfectly serviceable piece of dark comedy. But a return trip to that well, in which Roger attempts to pry the monster’s disembodied hand off a toddler’s neck while simultaneously peacocking for the boy’s hot mom, falls terribly, as the wacky loose-hand hijinks don’t mesh with the child’s wretched crying. House is unable to pick a lane, and this is a recurring problem. Should we see Roger as the one sane man in a world gone mad, or as a troubled individual very steadily beginning to crack under the pressure? Are George Wendt and Richard Moll here to show off their sitcom-honed comedic chops, or to play against type? The movie can’t figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time, which means we have a comedy and a horror film trying to occupy the same space, and the emotional wires get seriously crossed. An inherently ludicrous scene, such as a mounted swordfish coming to life like an enormous Big Mouth Billy Bass, is treated as an intense moment of fear and conflict (despite the fact that the thing is, you know, stuck to the wall). Meanwhile, Roger’s PTSD-laden Vietnam flashbacks look like someone saw Sands of Iwo Jima once. (House’s version of ‘Nam isn’t so much shot on the backlot as it is in someone’s backyard.) We never get a true sense of this experience as a lifelong trauma, let alone the source of the film’s Big Bad.

One has to acknowledge that film’s most obvious forebear: House feels like a cheap knockoff of ’s Evil Dead (the irony being that Evil Dead probably cost the same as this film’s catering budget). The truth is that if Miner and Cunningham ever watched Evil Dead, they couldn’t figure out how to replicate the formula. You can feel them getting awfully close to their goal. Director Miner, a veteran of the second and third entries in the Friday the 13th series (producer Sean Cunningham directed the first), wants to tap into the fun of watching people running from their fears, only you’re expected to care about these characters far more than any of the denizens of Camp Crystal Lake. And those monsters are disgusting, but gleefully so. The hideous beast lurking in the bedroom closet, that Lady Gremlin-esque deceiver, even Moll’s hellish soldier back from the dead to avenge his betrayal all go for gross in the most fun way possible. It’s not scary, exactly, but it’s funhouse scary. (Quite frankly, there’s nothing in this film nearly as unsettling as the movie’s own poster.) Plus, casting Wiliam Katt proves a savvy choice; he’s not exactly dripping with personality, but he’s game and never sells out the absurdities with a wink or a shrug, which means scenes like his journey into the dark void that lies just the other side of his bathroom medicine cabinet are surprisingly strong.

To damn it with faint praise, House is… fine. It’s not especially scary, but it does have moments of surprise or amusing disgust. It’s not particularly funny, although there are chuckles here and there. It doesn’t make all that much sense, yet I can see how remaking it as a six-part Netflix series could give the story’s many ideas the space to take shape and resolve. As it stands, House is a pleasant diversion. But that’s one man’s story.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film may in fact offer at least a few more laughs than actual scares, but it is certainly one of the weirder examples of a horror comedy hybrid simply by dint of the fact that it utilizes PTSD (whether caused by war experiences or the disappearance of a child) for some of its humor.” – Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray)

(This movie was nominated for review by Matt. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MÉCANIX (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Rémy Mathieu Larochelle

FEATURING: Julianne Côté, Stéphane Bilodeau

PLOT: One of the last surviving humans has discovered the embryo of the universe, and the hideous monsters who now control the world are desperate to keep him from using it to destroy them.

Still from Mecanix (2003)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The parade of unholy stop-motion concoctions gets our attention. The unflinching vision of a filmmaker in his only significant cinematic credit stokes our curiosity. But it’s those things in service of apocalyptic vibes and a story that is both bleak and somewhat irrelevant that pushes this film strongly towards consideration. It’s a movie beholden to nothing but itself.

COMMENTS: One of my favorite obscure novels is Future Boston, a shared universe by a collective of Beantown science fiction writers who imagined the fate of their city if the first alien contact was made smack dab in the middle of Boston Harbor. One of the significant characters in the book is Bishop 24, a mysteriously formal interplanetary overseer, resembling a gigantic praying mantis, who shepherds humanity into the galactic community. Interaction with the Bishop is described thusly: “The Bishop has a habit of moving in a quick, jerky fashion when his attention is distracted. This is unnerving to some people and has been known to cause epileptic seizures.” To depict the movement and bearing of a creature alien to us, the writer essentially describes classic stop-motion animation.

Rémy M. Larochelle undoubtedly recognizes this alien and uncanny quality. For his sole outing as a feature filmmaker, Larochelle unveils a rogues’ gallery of fascinating and appalling creatures. Shot in a dark sepia tone that makes every scene feel like deleted footage from a snuff film, Mécanix feels like a nightmare that the filmmaker was compelled to get out of his system any way he could, and 16mm stop-motion was the only tool he had at hand. Knowing that, he leans into both the imaginative potential and technical limitations of the technique; Mécanix features a remarkable variety of animated critters, looking variously like equine bipedal skeletons, bubo-ridden Buddhas, tree mermaids, wire-brush birds, and bad-permed llamas. Their appearances are already terrifying, but the hallmarks of their animation—spasmodic jerkiness, absence of motion blur—only heighten their disturbing nature. With flailing cable appendages and misplaced heads, they need only be themselves to be the stuff of bad dreams. Daniel Lagacé’s industrial sound design— an array of distorted clangs, whirrs, and whooshes—helps to give the varmints unnatural life.

Through interviews and key art, you can tease out the hint of a plot involving a lost embryo that, if found, will defeat the alien invaders and restore the promise of life to humanity. The live-action scenes exist primarily in service of this throughline. But the story is largely beside the point, as is demonstrated whenever humans and manipulated maquettes are called upon to share the screen. When they do so, the technique is most often a rudimentary split screen, with the actors standing carefully still while the monsters react dramatically to whatever plot development is presented to them. (It’s a reminiscent of the way Björk dances in front of oversized insects in her “Human Behaviour” video, although of course with none of her screen presence.) But the choice works because the aliens, in one of the few pieces of dialogue, explain the deadly power of emotion, so foreign and deadly to them that even the whiff of a flower could destroy them.

Larochelle knows this is only going to work if things get pretty gross. Early on, we watch a doctor search for the embryo by yanking out the innards of her few remaining fellow humans. Later, a man will invert the procedure by vivisecting an avian creature in an impressively effective piece of puppeteering. (In fairness, he’ll end up doing a little grisly self-surgery as well.) And the monsters often take themselves apart and reassemble for locomotion or conversation. None of this is frightening, exactly, but Mécanix is so viscerally broken and oozy that the effect is more powerful than a jump-scare. It all just feels so unfamiliar and not-at-all right.

Larochelle began working on Mécanix right out of college and spent four years filming and animating the piece. It’s a point in favor of his native Canada that a movie like this can not only be made, but even get funding from the National Film Board of Canada. At a lean 70 minutes, it still feels like it could use a little tightening. There isn’t much in the way of conflict: the aliens demand the embryo, the man steadfastly refuses to give it, and the finish has the whiff of anticlimax. But there’s no denying that Mécanix is a singular effort, one that combines animation technique and icky atmosphere in a form that resembles little before or since. You might say that it’s “unnerving to some people.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Imagine then if someone had rifled through Ray Harryhausen’s bins, scavenging for his discarded works. Those ideas that he deemed too weird to finish. Imagine too that this “someone” then took that weirdness and ran with it, stripping the designs back to their most basic forms, at times down to their wire frame maquettes. Such are the denizens of Larochelle’s world… this little slice of the bizarre is a beast that stands tall and one that more than holds its own…” – Andy Stewart, Nerdly

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)

DIRECTED BY: Arthur Crabtree

FEATURING: Marshall Thompson, Kim Parker, Kynaston Reeves, Terry Kilburn, Stanley Maxted

PLOT: An officer at a an American air base in rural Manitoba teams up with a comely young researcher to investigate mysterious deaths, which locals blame on a top secret nuclear project.

Still from fiend without a face (1958)

COMMENTS: This time a year ago, I was absorbing the marvels of a wondrous motion picture entitled The Giant Claw. That film built its mystery by hiding its central antagonist for a significant portion of the running time, permitting the imaginations of audiences to run wild searching for an explanation. This was followed by an enormous shift in tone due to the eventual revelation of the monster, a silly, gangly mess that drastically undercut the gravity of the story.

In some respects, history repeats itself with Fiend Without a Face, a movie in which we actually witness the murder of several townspeople by a force we cannot see, thereby building a mystery around what precisely is going on. As for what happens when we do finally lay eyes upon the title character… well, let’s just come back to that in a bit, shall we?

During the very long time that Fiend Without a Face itself waits for that big revelation, it has to fill the time with distractions. There are repercussions over the activities at the air base, which NIMBY-leaning locals blame for the mysterious deaths as well as for a decrease in dairy production. There’s the slow-burning investigation by Major Cummings, which at one point takes a lengthy side trip to a cemetery crypt. Cummings also gets the film’s romance plot, making eyes at the sister of the first victim, helped in part by an especially egregious shower scene. While none of this is boring, exactly, it’s not particularly interesting, especially since the audience is primed for a monster. It’s up to a cast of impressively obscure nobodies to sell the escalating tension through horrified stares and dramatic physical lurches. (The only cast member whose name rang any bells for me was E. Kerrigan Prescott, better known in these parts for his mad-scientist turn from Godmonster of Indian Flats.) They succeed only modestly, adding to the pressure to deliver something extraordinary at the climax.

It is a heck of a thing we ultimately get, so let’s talk about these monsters who have been sucking out their victims’ brains and spinal cords. Turns out they themselves are brains. Literally brains, with spinal cords for tails, eyestalks, and two little kickstand proboscises that deprive humans of their, well, brains and spinal cords. In the story, they’ve been wished into existence by a retired professor who Major Cummings deduces has been performing poorly vetted experiments with mental powers. In filmic terms, they’re brought to life through a combination of stop-motion animation, ill-concealed wire work, and broad acting. Oh, and they’re are goofy as all get-out. Look, I understand that special effects from yesteryear can’t be judged by the technology of today. That’s fine. But they’re still just brains, either animated to move like snakes or flown about like marionettes. The logic of brain-eating creatures that are themselves brains is impossible to parse. So you’re left with something that’s quite ridiculous, but also not quite ridiculous enough.

The climactic showdown between a group of humans trapped inside a house while a horde of flying brains tries to bust in was notable in its day for its new levels of violence and gore. (The film was called out as offensive in the British Parliament.) The setting also seems to presage settings to come, such as those seen in Night of the Living Dead or Evil Dead II. But this film’s solution is the equivalent of sending the cavalry. After all, what saves the day? How does one defeat a foe that has been created by an unholy blend of nuclear power and the untapped recesses of the human mind? Why, with guns, of course. The trio of Air Force officers starts taking out the little airborne cerebella by peppering them with bullets (and the occasional blunt instrument), resulting in a gleefully gross stew of blood and effluvia. It’s a classically 1950s mindset, using brute force to overcome the odds. This carries over to the most absurd plot element, in which Cummings saves the day by blowing up the nuclear power plant with dynamite. (Certainly no potential downside to that plan.) 

Fiend Without a Face is light fun, a solid representative of 1950s cinematic horror boasting three salient characteristics: an intriguing premise, very low-budget production, and a monster that doesn’t quite live up to the hype. File it next to similar efforts from the period like Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man, or The Crawling Eye. You know, the kind of film that works best if you just shut off your brain.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There can be no purer surrealism in cinema than the sight of these twitching brain-things besieging a house full of people, leaping and plopping like possessed frogs. The entire climax has the bizarreness of some mad medieval allegory, like a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch” – Nigel Honeybone, Horror News

(This movie was nominated for review by Paula. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

CAPSULE: THE GIANT CLAW (1957)

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DIRECTED BY: Fred F. Sears

FEATURING: Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum, Edgar Barrier

PLOT: When an unidentified flying object terrorizing the globe is discovered to be an enormous, grotesque bird, the planet’s collective scientific brainpower and military might are brought to bear against the winged menace.

Still from The Giant Claw (1957)

COMMENTS: One of the great stories of cinema is the tale surrounding the production of Jaws. It seems the robotic shark that was built to terrorize the citizens of Amity was temperamental at best, unusable at worst. Accordingly, director Steven Spielberg was forced to scrap many of the intended scenes featuring the automated predator, instead resorting to obfuscatory tricks to keep the villain hidden until the last possible moment. This ended up working to the film’s benefit, as the star’s delayed entrance only served to magnify the tension. Spielberg had stumbled backwards into brilliance.

Of course, it’s questionable how much his tactics would have worked had the ultimate reveal of the shark not paid off the suspense. Once the chum-shoveling Roy Scheider comes face-to-face with Bruce the animatronic carcharodon, then we’re off to the races, because the reveal has justified the withholding. You can believe your eyes. It is the black-eyed, remorseless killing machine we were promised.

In some respects, The Giant Claw faces precisely the same dilemma. The filmmakers want to hold back the full and awesome power of their beast for as long as possible. We get hints, of course: blurry visions of an airborne foe, evocative descriptions of a flying creature “the size of a battleship,” an enormous footprint indicating the immensity of the monster, and many Spielbergian stares into the unseen maw of a force to terrible to behold. But at some point, the monster has to be revealed. And when at last it is… my goodness, how can I do this justice? Can it even be conveyed? I mean, here are just a few examples of my peers attempting to reckon with this thing:

All true, and that last one probably comes closest to illustrating just Continue reading CAPSULE: THE GIANT CLAW (1957)

CAPSULE: THEY CRAWL BENEATH (2022)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Dale Fabrigar

FEATURING: Joseph Almani, Karlee Eldridge, Michael Paré

PLOT: A series of earthquakes has unleashed deadly nematodes, and Danny is forced to confront his lineage while awaiting rescue from this wormy menace.

Still from They Crawl Beneath (2022)

COMMENTS: Upon finishing They Crawl Beneath, I discovered a message on my answering machine regarding a matter that required prompt attention. This effort took approximately eighty minutes to bring it—not quite—to a close. During my various intervals of being put on hold while I was shuffled around between departments, an unfortunate thought occurred: I was finding this mundane tedium far more satisfying than Dale Fabrigar’s film.

They Crawl Beneath has no respect for the audience’s attention, or intelligence. And a creature feature has no business being this slow, much less waiting until the midpoint (the first half ranking among the least pleasant 40 minutes I’ve endured in a movie) for the crawlers in question to fully mount their offensive. And speaking of offensive, I was nearly tickled with dismay at the character Doctor Wu, a definitely-Asian scientist who somehow has all the answers and, somehow, meets an off-screen death mentioned in one of the throwiest-away of throwaway lines I’ve ever heard. But I get ahead of myself: Jimmy the Cop is a good guy with a bad uncle and a dead dad, who gets trapped under a vintage car in a garage geographically situated in an earthquake-prone part of the world. He faces some worms and familial demons while his girlfriend hovers in the periphery—usually delivering lines in a monotone trance.

Sound cues do all the work for you, be they declarations of “Here there be melodrama!” or of “Here there be scary!” The heavy-handedness of the score bordered on ridiculous, but unfortunately maintained a heartfelt dalliance with boring bombast. Whatever they paid the actors, it was too much—and even more so, the screenwriter. It’d take someone with the B-movie charm of ten Bruce Campbells to compellingly deliver lines like, “Gwen, listen to me: I want to live. For you, and our baby” (oh yes, I had forgotten they threw in a truly random pregnancy to ratchet up the… something), or what I can only presume was an attempt at comedy, “I am definitely hallucinating.”

The movie did nothing well—my time could hardly be described as valuable, but even I felt insulted by this rotten attempt at storytelling. And though my game of phone-tag and being put on hold is, alas, not quite complete, I take considerable comfort in the fact that at least my experience with They Crawl Beneath is over with.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The result is a really weird combo platter of interpersonal dysfunction within the context of a monster movie, and however many creatures are lying below, They Crawl Beneath might have resonated better had it decided on what kind of a film it really wants to be.”–Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray)