Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

Well, here we are again; another year, another Amityville sequel, the 18th(!!!) in the series. As is often the case, the story behind the film is often more interesting than the film itself and that is certainly the case here, so I'll make the plot description nice and short (I mean, it's a fucking Amityville sequel, who cares, right?). Luckily, there isn't much of a plot to recount!

40 years after the events that forced the Lutz family to flee, an awful single mother and her child --a wannabe-goth older daughter, an annoying younger daughter, and a son who's been in a vegetative state for two years following a convoluted accident-- move in, operating under the impression that the powers enclosed in the house will somehow cure the son's coma....for some reason. Much to the surprise of everyone his condition DOES indeed begin to improve! Has the house grown benevolent in its old age? Or does the house have plans for the infirm lad?

Anyway, now onto the shit I actually want to talk about:

Dimension Films originally signed writer/director Franck (P2, 2012's Maniac remake) Khalfoun to deliver a Rated-R film, and once the film was shot they, as Dimension has a history of doing, essentially locked Khalfoun out of the building and recut it. However, instead of doing what they usually do and secretly hiring a scab director to reshoot half the film so it makes no fucking sense (see Halloween 6: The Curse of Micheal Myers), they, for reasons unknown to anyone, cut Awakening down to a PG-13--removing some gore gags and an entire incest subplot-- as if this thing was ever going to play theaters. They then proceeded to take the newly-neutered film and shelved it, playing chicken with a release date for FIVE WHOLE YEARS before finally dumping it onto DVD. 

So all that's kinda fucked, right? Those edits against the wishes of the major creative force must be why the movies not so great, right? Guys, I'm gonna be perfectly honest here, I don't think any amount of blood splatters or or weird mother/son bone-zoning would've helped the cliched script, the oddly dull camera work, some of the worst acting I've seen in quite some time, or an obnoxiously meta subplot that includes the other Amityville movies existing as movies in this universe --at one point one of the low-rent Siouxsie Sioux ripoff's friends actually holds the fucking Amityville Horror DVD up to the camera, as if reminding us we could've spent this time watching a better film.

I've seen plenty of reviews stating they believe there was a good movie hidden somewhere in The Awakening but it was silenced by producer meddling. I, on the other hand, feel like the only good thing I can say about it was I'm glad to see the family's fridge was stocked with Big Red instead of any of the more well-known soda brands.

Blu Ray Review: Ice Cream Man

Ice Cream Man, an obscure cult film from the dark ages of horror (ie 1995), might seem like an odd choice for a super fancy, limited-run blu ray release. Honestly, it kind of IS an odd choice, but luckily 'odd' is something I relish.

This film, about a crazed and homicidal ice cream man (played full tilt by Clint Howard) and the small group of kids who are on to his grue-slingin' ways, suffers from an identity crisis. According to the director himself, as quoted from the dreadful commentary track --seriously, multiple times throughout he just stops talking for upwards of five minutes at a time, which one would assume is a major no-no when recording audio-- he recorded for this new blu ray from Vinegar Syndrome, "I tried to make a film that was half kids' movie and half horror movie, and ended up shitting on both." What we are left with is something to full of blood and boobs for kids, yet to soft for most horror fans. However, there's plenty here to enjoy.

Have you ever stumbled across a movie that might not be "good" in any conventional way, but is so unabashedly fucking strange you can't help but like it? You know, something like The Howling 2: My Sister is a Werewolf or the Japanese Evil Dead Trap? Well, Ice Cream Man fits in beautifully with those titles. With logic leaps, nearly hysterical acting, continuity that could be described as "loose" if one were in a generous mood, and bizarre unexplained plot details (my favorite being when Clint "plants" those plastic, spinning daisy lawn ornaments and every other character, including a pair of supposedly sane detectives, treating them as though they were real daisies), Ice Cream Man stands out whereas it might've otherwise been forgotten.

As far as the blu ray goes, the picture and audio are about as good as they're every going to be for a small budget, mid-90s horror film. Aside from the aforementioned commentary track, there are three interviews with Clint Howard,  director Norman Apstein (this interview is much better than his commentary and covers most of the same info), and producer David Goldstein.  The real standout, however, is the Monstervision Summer School Edition, which allows you to watch the film with all the Joe Bob Briggs Monstervision bits from it's TV debut on that program. As a lifelong Monstervision fan, this was one of the best special features that could've possibly been added.

At the time of this writing there are only 177 copies of Ice Cream Man available straight from Vinegar Syndrome, so if any of this piqued your interest I'd urge you to head that way as fast as possible.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

The Poughkeepsie Tapes has had quite a difficult time finding a release. Made in 2007, it toured to festival circuit to overwhelming positive reviews and was promptly picked up for distribution by MGM, slated for a 2008 theatrical release. However, Hollywood film studios are fickle mistresses, and PT (as I'm going to be referring to it from now on because 'Poughkeepsie' is hard to spell) found its release date pushed back about four separate times before finally disappearing altogether from company's schedule. While the brothers behind the film, director/writer John Erick Dowdle and writer/producer Drew Dowdle, went on to have moderate levels of success in Hollywood with titles such as Quarantine (a remake of Spanish found-footage film [rec]), the Shyamalan-produced Devil, and the trippy As Above So Below, really nothing more was heard about the feature that brought them to the attention of the studios. From there, its legend, as well as the hype about how disturbing it was, grew and grew for a solid ten years before it finally received an official home video release courtesy of Scream Factory. So, did it manage to live up to a full decade of hype and expectation? Shockingly, for the most part, yes!

The basis of this mockumentary (NOT a found-footage film, but I'll get more into that later) is the discovery and examination of over 800 sequentially-numbered video tapes --the titular tapes of the title-- found in a police raid on an abandoned house in Poughkeepsie, NY. The tapes not only detailed the practices of a killer known in the area as The Water Street Butcher, but proved both he'd been an active murderer far longer than theorized and was even more sadistic than anyone could've possibly imagined. The myriad stalkings, tortures and murders are presented in an upsetting realistic fashion, reminding one of the mysterious side of YouTube and the faux-snuff of the August Underground series, and still manage to be disturbing despite the many years of envelope-pushing content released in the subsequent ten years since its creation.

Presented as one of those 'true crime' docs littering Netflix these days, PT firmly plants itself in the realm of mockumentary (for other prime examples I recommend The Taking of Deborah Logan and S&Man) by presenting a framework of music, titles, and talking head interviews to supplement its POV segments. The acting by the predominately little-known cast is superb and naturalistic, assisting the aesthetic of realism to no end. Same goes for the effects. While there's little on-screen violence, the filmmakers choosing to focus more on mental and psychological abuse which is far more horrifying in this reviewer's opinion, the effects we see are well done if perhaps a teeny bit dull.

Ultimately, The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a well-made film, still powerful and retaining its shock value despite years of hype and a substantial amount of gorier films. Well worth the wait and definitely worth the purchase price.

Gerald's Game (2017)

This is quite a year for Mr. Stephen King, isn't it? Two new novels, Gwendy's Button Box and Sleeping Beauties (co-written by Richard Chizmar and his own son Owen King, respectively); a second, critically-acclaimed film adaptation of It; The Dark Tower finally saw life on the screen, albeit in an abysmal way; and an upcoming film adaptation of novella 1922, from his short fiction collection Full Dark, No Stars. However, the bit of King news this writer was the most excited about was a Netflix-produced film version of one of my favorite of his novels, Gerald's Game; and by one of my favorite directors working in the genre today, Mike (Absentia, Oculus) Flanagan, no less! I have to go ahead and say, this may be one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever made.

Jess and Gerald, a middle-aged married couple in Louisiana, head up to their secluded vacation home in an attempt to save their crumbling marriage by fulfilling a particular bondage/rape fantasy of his. Unfortunately for both, Gerald should've watched his cholesterol levels a little more; he keels over dead after about 10 minutes, leaving Jess chained to the bedposts with all means of escape --phone, keys, etc-- mere inches out of her reach. If that weren't bad enough, she'd come to regret not making sure their front door was fully closed, thanks to a ravenous stray dog, and a "man made of moonlight" who may or may not be there.

If you were to read the 1992 novel --part of King's "feminist trilogy" that also included Delores Claiborne and Rose Madder-- you would notice that roughly 90% of the book is composed of Jess' internal monologue, and therefore, unfilmable. Writer/director Mike Flanagan certainly did, as he has admitted in multiple interviews, which makes his handling of the multiple inner voices our heroine uses to work her way through he situation even more impressive. Instead of doing the cheesy voice-over thing, he chose to make her internal voices external. She hallucinates versions of herself (including one of her as a child), her newly-dead husband, and even her father giving voice to them.

Gerald's Game is practically word-for-word and beat-for-beat drawn directly from the book but with the fat cut out, keeping an impressive pace and palpable level of tension for a story that could very well have been boring if in less capable hands. The acting is universally perfect, and no worries, people who've read the book, they do not hold back on any of the more visceral moments, including THAT solar eclipse flashback sequence. I literally cannot think of a single negative thing to say about Gerald's Game, and while I know that doesn't make for a very interesting review, I couldn't be happier.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

In 2010 a gaggle of monsters that hadn't been considered 'scary' in a long time came crashing out of Norway in the form of found-footage hit Trollhunter, the most profitable film to come out of that particular frostbitten country in history. It would be a full six years before director Andre "Name With a Bunch of Accent Marks I Can't Replicate Unless I Reset My Keyboard to Norwegian Which I'm Not Gonna Do" Ovredal would release another film, this time in English, and while it couldn't be more different in tone and style from Trollhunter, I'm pleased to say The Autopsy of Jane Doe is just as impressive in it's own right.

We start off following a sheriff arriving at a home that also happens to be the sight of a grizzly triple homicide in which it appears all the victims died desperately trying to leave the house. But that's not the strangest thing; that would go to the partially uncovered body of an anonymous young woman --our titular Jane Doe-- in the dirt-floor basement. She's taken to the local funeral home, run by a father/son combo, both of whom are still grieving from the wife/mother's death two years before, for the procedure of the title. They open her to find shattered wrists and ankles, dozens of lacerations on her internal organs, and lungs like she inhaled enough smoke to smother four or five people, yet there are no indicators of any injury whatsoever outside. Far from it, her skin is alabaster perfection. Then, things start to get weird, with hallucinations, dead animals, and a very clear link to the occult.

Gone is the found footage aesthetic and all it's trappings of Trollhunter (though don't let the found footage thing scare you off from watching that film if you hate that style, because as April Snellings wrote in a review of the film it "owes more to Jurassic Park than The Blair Witch Project"), and in its place is an assured, fluid camera and careful lighting that recalls an antiseptic version of the gothic works of Terrence Fisher. Whereas Trollhunter wanted you to oogle over the titular creatures in all their glory, Autopsy is somewhat secretive, with very few on-screen special effects --except for the actual autopsy stuff, of course.

As far as acting goes, it's actually kind of amazing the best performance in the entire film is given by Olwen Catherine Kelly, who plays the corpse at the center of the mystery. Don't get me wrong, the other actors are fine; Emile Hirsch pulls off the idea of a character who wants to leave the situation he's in but doesn't know how to say it, and, frankly, I might have a little bit of a crush on Brian Cox and think he's wonderful in everything, but there's just some type of magnetism Jane Doe has that forces your eye to her every time. The minute changes to her facial expressions depending on what's going on in the scene make her feel almost more alive than any of the other characters whom are all stuck in the past in their own ways.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm a fan of this Norse master of genre cinema and you should definable check out both films discussed here.

It (2017)

1986 saw the release a 1,138 page behemoth of a novel by insanely-prolific writer Stephen King titled It, his 22nd novel and yet another New York Times number 1 bestseller --indeed, Publishers Weekly listed It as the best-selling book, both fiction AND nonfiction, in the US for that year. It proved to be so popular, in fact, the story of a group of misfit kids fighting an ancient evil in a small Maine town only to be forced to return 27 years later when it was proved they didn't quite finish the job found its way to television in the form of a 2 part, 4 hour long miniseries in 1990. The series, directed by Tommy (Halloween III) Lee Wallace, is still well-regarded and has become something of a cultural landmark for those of my generation thanks to years of syndication. Therefore, given how iconic the book and the character of Pennywise the Dancing Clown (played to perfection by Tim Curry in the miniseries) have become, you could understand the trepidation when a new adaption was announced. The fact that it took several years to see the light of day after numerous re shufflings in the crew, including multiple changes in writers and directors, didn't help. Luckily, all that worry was for nought!

 Before I go any further, I want to address the red-haired, pasty-faced elephant in the room; the new Pennywise. Like a lot of people, I was unimpressed when the first pics of Bill (Hemlock Grove) Skarsgard's Pennywise, and the thing I didn't much care for was the fact that his makeup and costume seemed so....easy. It was an obvious, Horror Movie Clown (c) type of place to go with it. The thing is, both the book and miniseries clown are visually unremarkable, they just look like regular-ass clowns. The fear was generated by actions, like Pennywise appearing in locations a clown absolutely should not be. By comparison, Bill's Pennywise seemed like he's trying way to hard to look scary. But then, something happened. Randomly one day an interview I read with James Wan popped into my head where he was discussing his film Insidious. He was asked why the Lipstick-Face Demon was smearing the bright red cosmetic on himself, and Wan answered he was doing that in an attempt to replicate the appearance of clown to draw people to him. Suddenly, everything clicked! Pennywise is not a man, he is an entity, and Pennywise is simply its interpretation of a clown. I had the same epiphany when the film started and we finally got to hear the voice Skarsgard went with; it's an utterly bizarre voice, but again, it's an incomprehensible being from beyond space and time trying to replicate human speech, so it makes perfect sense the cadence and whatnot hit the ear wrong.

 And those perfectly sensible changes aren't limited just to the main baddie either, most characters and events in the film differ from their source material in smart ways that brilliantly update the material not just for the late-80s setting but for a 2017 audience. The seven members of The Losers Club, as they proudly refer to themselves, are fleshed out in ways that make them feel more like real characters, as opposed to both the book and miniseries where they're a bit more archetypal, and it's a real delight just watching them interact with one another. It helps that the casting was pitch perfect, of course, and not just when it comes to our young protagonists.

The pace clips along at a nice pace that belays the 2hr 15min runtime, and I found Andy (Mama) Muschietti's direction more palatable here than in his previous works, and considering this movie completely shattered a half dozen box office records I think we'll be seeing his name attached to It: Part 2. Frankly, despite a script that feels a bit shaky at times and a couple other minor quibbles, I think this is a fine updating of a modern classic and I'm excited to see what happens with the second half of the story.

Annabelle: Creation (2017)

2014 saw the release of Annabelle, a prequel/spinoff of the excellent period possession film The Conjuring. For those who don't recall, it was, as they say in Spanish-speaking countries, 'no muy beuno;' boring, uninterested,  needlessly complicated and featuring only one, possibly two, effective and memorable scare scenes, it was unanimously decried as a fairly dull time. Well, it's three years later and Hollywood is so devoid of ideas we now have a prequel OF a prequel to deal with. However, could it be that's a good thing?

12 years after the tragic death of their daughter, dollmaker Samuel Mullins and his mysteriously bedridden wife open their improbably large house (in an improbably idyllic location) to several young girls and their nun caretaker from a shuttered orphanage. Janice, one of the youngest girl and stuck with a leg brace thanks to a recent polio outbreak, finds the normally-locked door of the daughter's room open and finds the doll we all now and love(?) inside a closet plastered with pages of the bible. She soon becomes the major target of a demonic force --is there any other kind of force in these movies?-- that wants her body and soul for its own purposes.

Director David F. (Lights Out) Sandberg lends the film the tension and suspense that was desperately needed in the first Annabelle film, and while there's nothing here you really haven't seen before (this WAS written by Gary Dauberman, after all), the script had a nice amount of character and eccentricity that makes it feel less like a studio flick and more like something the people involved actually gave a shit about. Sure it feels a bit padded at times and the "twist" ending is contrived to the point your eyes might just roll right out of their sockets, but it's leaps and bounds better than the first film. Since they're written by the same person, let's hope the next Conjuring spinoff The Nun is of at least the same quality as this.