100 Scariest Movie Moments: #34 The Hitcher

I’ve heard that Rutger Hauer was the inspiration for the vampire Lestat.  I’m sure that someday I’ll watch some of his older films and that will make sense.  But as it stands, the Rutger Hauer I know is a growling badass, not a charming French aristocrat.

The Hitcher doesn’t really have the usual pace of a Hollywood movie.  It’s like someone decided to skip over the entire first act of the film and just cut to the conflict.  John Rhyder (Hauer) is hitchhiking, and a tired motorist named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) picks him up.  We’re less than 10 minutes into the film when Rhyder has told Jim that he killed the last man to pick him up, and that intends to do the same thing to Jim.

Less than 15 minutes have passed when Jim, with a knife to his face, pushes Rhyder out of the car and drives away.  From this point on the movie has a single mission: to find a way to keep bringing Rhyder into conflict with Jim.  There’s exactly one further encounter that makes any sense; Rhyder is in a car with a family, still on the same road.  They pass Jim, and Jim tries to warn them.

After this encounter, Rhyder kills the family, gets a truck and chases Jim with it, destroys a gas station, slips into a diner and leaves a severed finger in Jim’s French fries, plants a bloody knife in Jim’s pocket, steals his wallet, unlocks his jail cell, and freely commits numerous murders while framing Jim for all of them.  The only person who believes him is Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a waitress he meets trying to gain access to a phone.  I could complain that he later encounters her again in an implausible way, but we’ve already established that this movie isn’t on speaking terms with realism, so why bother?

This movie succeeds primarily as a dark comedy.  Hauer and Howell both deliver appropriate performances, with Howell varying between realistically calm and hammily frantic based on whether or not Rhyder is in the room, and Hauer portraying a serial killer so unaffected by his own carnage that he makes Hannibal Lector look like a shuddering bundle of nerves.  Rhyder seems almost godlike in his capacity to murder indiscriminately, while Jim shows a truly astounding level of stupidity.  Because he has no proof of his identity, the police believe Jim’s the murderer.  (No, I don’t understand how those two things are related either.)  It’s established that he can prove his identity as soon as the business he works for opens on Monday, but he still chooses to run when the Hitcher frees him from police custody via murdering an entire police department.  Then Jim take two police officers hostage!

The movie is best remembered for a scene in which Rhyder captures Nash, ties her up between a truck and a trailer and threatens to rip her in half if Jim doesn’t shoot him.  This scene is sold as a masochistic struggle between Jim and Rhyder, since Nash has been given little characterization beyond the fact that she “believes Jim.”   It’s a struggle that Jim loses, dooming Nash, but Rhyder then allows himself to be arrested by the police.  The authorities immediately accept that Jim had nothing to do with any of the previous murders, since the laws of plot convenience dictate that two psychotic murderers cannot exist in the same time and place without the universe imploding.

In most movies, this would be the resolution, but the filmmakers apparently decided that not having a first act meant they needed to do the third act twice.  Jim knows that Rhyder will inevitably escape police custody, and that he’s the only one who can stop him!  The first clause of that last sentence seems reasonable enough, but the second… not so much.  However, Jim steals a police officer’s gun and uses it to steal his car (as if to remind them that they forgot to punish him for the first time he held police officers at gunpoint), so that he can chase down the armored car transporting Rhyder, and finally kill him, because he's a protagonist in the final conflict of the movie, and thus suddenly becomes competent.

This review has been a bit heavy on plot-summary I know, but that’s mainly because it would be ineffective to just tell you how insanely silly this story is.  I can’t imagine anyone over the age of five actually being frightened by it.  I think if it had come on television when I was younger, I wouldn’t have even thought to classify it as a horror movie, just as a fairly bloody action flick.  If that’s what you like, then see it.  But if you want to be terrified though, then stay away.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #35 Aliens

Alien is generally regarded as the best movie of its franchise, but I’d say that Aliens is more culturally significant. Pretty much all follow-ups take their queues from Aliens, with comics, novels and video games typically focusing on heavily armed mercenaries or Colonial Marines. Likewise, Alien rip-offs tend to involve heavily-armed soldiers squaring off with the monster.

It’s not hard to see why that is. Alien was not an easy story to tell effectively, and it worked mainly because it had a great director and actors. A more action-oriented film like Aliens is a safer bet. That said though, the film might surprise someone who came into it having seen, for example, Alien vs Predator. The movie has a slower pace than almost any other action film I’ve ever seen, and it takes a good hour for us to actually encounter the Xenomorphs.

That isn’t a bad thing though. The movie felt very real. The characters aren’t generic cardboard cutouts, but developed individuals who make plans, then scrap them and go back to the drawing board when they don’t work. To me, the most tense scenes are not the encounters with the Xenomorphs, but the characters sitting around between encounters, planning their strategies.

For anyone not familiar with the story: Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, duh) wakes up, her escape pod having drifted for 57 years after the events of Alien. The Weyland-Yutani Company pretends to not believe her story of an Alien organism killing the rest of the crew and forcing her to destroy the ship. However, reports have come in of some missing colonists on the asteroid the original Xenomorph came from, and the Company wants her to help them “investigate.” They eventually convince her to go back, with the promise that they’re going to exterminate any aliens they find rather than abduct them for study. (After the first movie, I’m sure that any viewer’s reaction to this claim is “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”)

If I do have a criticism of this movie, it’s that Ripley borders on Mary Sue territory. She has no military experience, yet is presented as the most competent person in dealing with Xenomorphs based upon a single encounter. I can understand this early in the film when it’s made clear that Weyland-Yutani intentionally sabotaged the mission with an incompetent officer. But after that officer becomes incapacitated, I would expect the soldiers to step-up their game rather than fall into line and obey Ripley’s every command. Even so, Ripley never comes across as a superhero, just a little too competent. And Weaver’s performance is good enough to sell it.

My favorite touch to the film is the android Bishop (Lance Henriksen). Androids seem to be a high-point in this series, with Ash, Bishop and David written and acted to be three truly distinct characters. (Yes, I like Prometheus, and I may write a rant about that someday.) I don’t think it’s ever been definitively established (if it even could be) whether or not androids in this universe feel emotions, but my personal inclination is to believe that they do. I see each of these three as defined by a different form of resentment for humans: Ash sees our morality as a flawed, Bishop is annoyed at being viewed as an inferior despite his untiring efforts to help humans, and David is furious that he’s unable to act in accordance with his own wishes.

The two remaining things I probably have to comment on are Newt (Carrie Henn) and the Alien Queen. Newt is a girl orphaned by the Xenomorphs and protected by Ripley. As for her, she’s a child in a movie who doesn’t annoy me, and for the most part the actress is competent. Props to her. Good job.

The Alien Queen is just awesome. Re-watching this movie, I was sitting in my own living room with the lights on when Ripley encountered the Queen, and I still nearly ran. Watching her wake up and slowly open her mouth is far more frightening than any of the drones she sent out as you realize just what it is that Ripley's up against.

Aliens is an awesome movie. James Cameron is one of the greatest directors in Hollywood. Or a least, he was before he started making movies about giant Smurfs in Fern Gully. Debating which of the two films is better is an exercise in futility, because it’s simply debating whether one Masterpiece is better than another. And to do so is to miss the point entirely.

Wednesday Review: The Witch

Before I went into The Witch, conveniently enough, I was thinking of MovieBob's video on Ghostbusters, as well as the upcoming sequel to The Conjuring. While I wasn't there for the Reagan years, Bob tell us that it was a time of Conservative backlash, in which films like The Exorcist and The Omen warned us of the dangers of losing touch with our old traditions. Bob went on to argue that Ghostbusters was a counter-backlash, in which science and religion clash, and religion gets its ass kicked. Before the movie started I was contemplating how this battle was starting up again, with the stories of Ed and Lorraine Warren opening up opposite a reboot of Ghostbusters.

Then The Witch started, and I found myself viewing a film that better captured the zeitgeist of our age than either of those films are likely to. This is a film that presents us with religious fanatics, but asks us to neither hate them nor put them on a pedestal. Instead, the film asks us to pity them, as we see their own fanaticism destroy them.

To me, at least, this captures the spirit of the last decade or so. The religious fanatics circle the wagon, not to stave off the forces of secularism, but the force of doubt. If there is a new idea emerging from the youth of this age it's simply that certainty in any belief or ideal can be catastrophic, while no one has ever shed blood in the name of doubt. There's no way science or magic can save you, but evil can't knock down a tower of belief if the tower is flexible. So, evil would logically attempt it's assault on those of us who have the most rigid and fragile views of the world. Anyone who grew up in a deeply religious home can tell you just how vulnerable such a state of religious surrender can be.

To talk about the actual movie, it opens with a Puritan man and his family being banished from an early American colony over his own unorthodox religious views. While we're not given the specifics, it's made pretty clear that this is a man too fundamentalist for the Puritans. I suspect the scene at the colony may have been included to reassure us that this film would not have the same ending as The Village.

Some time after their move, the family suffers a blight on their crops, and their infant son disappears suddenly. This is only the beginning of a string of tragedies that I won't dare to spoil. Eventually, the family comes to believe that they are under attack by a Witch. We're shown fairly early that they're correct, but it's their actions that ultimately doom them, more than any external threat could.

I admire this movie for showing the family, at least initially, as very loving. It would have been easy to show the father as either a cold, brutal man, or affably evil. Instead, we're shown a man who clearly loves his family deeply, and is determined to provide for them, both physically and spiritually. However, he's confronted with the harsh truth that he simply doesn't know what can save his family. The tone varies between comedy and horror, with the father approaching Wile E. Coyote levels of zealotry as he doubles his efforts while forgetting his aim.

The rest of the family are a collection of time bombs. Every one of them is so utterly repressed in their emotions, and so isolated, that the slightest temptation could send them off their path and into Hell. As with the father, there's literally nothing any of them could do that would make you feel anything but sorry for them.

I liked a lot of the creative choices as well. The movie mostly avoided jump scares. It often teased them, and then backed away at the very brink, leaving the audience uncomfortable. It also gave the entire family accents so difficult to understand that we only got the general gist of what they were saying, which helped to create a feeling that we were looking in on a different society if not an entirely different world. We understood these people in the broadest of terms, which paradoxically deepens our connection to them.

The ending is absolutely brilliant, and reinforces my entire understanding. The easiest victims for the devil are his most fanatical enemies. Evil preys on those who are completely unable to adapt or deal in shades of gray. I've heard so many fanatics say that either the entire Bible is true, or not a word of it is. By their own admission any error in their sacred text would destroy their faith, and with it their entire basis for morality.

It's probably obvious that my experiences influenced my viewing of this movie. It's hard to say how people with other experiences might interpret the film differently. I can only tell you that it's a wonderfully acted film that will leave you shivering. This is the best horror film I've seen since It Follows. I hope to see more like this in the future. If you haven't seen it, check it out.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #36 Cape Fear

Anyone who’s seen both The Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear would have to suspect the Robert Mitchum is some great incarnation of Evil who took up acting as a career. It’s easy for him to give off a terrifying presence, while at the same time coming across as likable. He’s something of an early Hannibal Lecter in that sense, only smoother, and less intellectual.

The plot of Cape Fear is that a rapist named Max Cady (Mitchum) has just been released from prison. He blames a lawyer named Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck), who testified against him for his incarceration. (Yes, he was a witness who just happened to be a lawyer, no I don’t know why the writer did that.) And intends to harass Bowden and eventually rape his young daughter.

This movie is an unintentional period piece due to the legal issues involved. Firstly and most prominently, Cady’s plan revolves around never actually doing anything illegal until near the end of the film, because he never sets foot on Bowden’s property or touches him. However, in the 21^st Century following someone around in public so aggressively would be called “Stalking,” and he would promptly be arrested for it. And secondly, Cady’s plan revolves around Bowden being unwilling to make his daughter sit in the same room as her rapist and testify. Given that rape victims are now legally allowed to give video testimony to avoid exactly this scenario, it would also be ineffective.

However, this doesn’t take away from the dread of the film. It goes into so much detail about the legal intricacies of the time in which it’s set that it feels very real. Cady has worked out every single, possible trumped-up charge the police could use against him, and has preemptively addressed them all.

One thing notable about the film is that it never vilifies Cady’s lawyer. He’s established as a decent person who believes Cady is being harassed by the police as they search for something to charge him with. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a lawyer to start asking questions when his client is arrested, released, searched, and forced to move twice by the police, all in the space of a single week without a single charge being filed. The legal system isn’t broken, Cady is just a monster who’s really good at taking advantage of it.

The thing that makes this movie most frightening to modern viewers is that the word “rape” is never actually uttered. In most modern crime films dealing with a rapist, we’d likely hear the police discussing getting a blood type from his semen and be given the intricate details in all but flow-chart form. However, the Hayes Code was stillin effect when this film was made, meaning that directly referring to rape would have gotten the film banned. So instead, this film makes use of this taboo by making it clear that the characters don’t want to use the word, and the result is terrifying.

The fight sequences at the climax do come off as a bit awkward. My understanding is that this was a result of the filmmakers’ having trouble covering up the fact that Gregory Peck was considerably larger and stronger than Robert Mitchum. They address this somewhat by covering up Peck’s body more than Mitchum’s, which fits with the characters. It works to an extent, but I still get the feeling that if Peck had ever thrown a real punch Mitchum’s head would have gone flying.

Once again though, this is a fairly minor criticism. For most of the film, the primary threat is to Bowden’s daughter. And therefore, even if Bowden was easily able to overpower Cady, he couldn’t have watched her every moment of every day.

This is one of the few black-and-white films that I do find absolutely chilling. Coming out in the early 1960s, it was definitely a time when the Hayes Code was already under heavy fire. People understood that films did not need to be family-friendly affairs, and this was a film that only a moron would have taken a child to see. So don’t show it to your kids, but do watch it.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #37 House on Haunted Hill

It’s truly amazing to find that House on Haunted Hill came out several years before The Haunting. Everything about this movie screams that it was made as an attempt to cash-in on the later film; playing out with a much stronger B-movie vibe and giving us definitive answers, whereas The Haunting gave us only questions and ambiguity. It reminds me of how film buffs frequently say that they should remake bad movies to create good versions, because The Haunting was effectively this movie done again, and done better.

The set up is that millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) has invited five people to a party at a supposedly haunted house. Once the doors are locked, they’ll all be trapped in the house for the night. The next morning they, or their surviving next-of-kin, will receive $10,000.

One interesting variation on the general set-up of the Haunted House movie is that none of the deaths are claimed to be “mysterious.” Seven people have died in the house, all by murder. So within this setting, the ghosts (assuming that they exist) must use humans to carry out their evil. They also note that none of the murders have been normal stabbings or shootings, with at least one carried out by a man throwing his wife in a tank of acid. Perhaps the filmmakers intended this to bring back an element of ambiguity to the deaths. However, for the deaths we witness, the events and motives leading to them were clearly in motion long before any of these people set foot in the house.

The movie uses a lot of weird events and shock scares. I don’t think for one moment you would put it past Loren to have set them up, and none of them would have been especially difficult to fake. Dead bodies, a face in a box, and someone being jumped from behind by the caretaker… He also gives all of the guests loaded guns, for God knows what reason. The scares do grow stronger over the course of the film, but to list them all would take far too much of my time and the time of anyone who reads this.

The B-plot, if you could really consider it separate from the A-plot, is how Loren and his wife both despise each other, and each of them are convinced the other will kill them if given the opportunity... or maybe they’re just paranoid... or maybe the wife is merely casting suspicion on him. At no point do you believe either of them would hesitate to kill the other if presented with the opportunity. And in the end, your suspicions about both of them prove to be entirely founded.

The final resolution shows that both Loren and his wife (Carol Ohmart) were attempting to kill each other, but that Loren was one step ahead of her. He set her up to think she’d killed him, then used a skeleton on a string to scare her so that she fell into a vat of acid, along with her lover. He then disposes of the skeleton in the acid and confesses to the murder, knowing that in the absence of any evidence of his ambush, he can claim that the whole thing was self-defense, and at worst, receive a light sentence.

I will be honest, I do love the ending. I like it mainly because it’s not something we often see. Usually villains will either be rational, planning to get away with it all, or irrational, planning to take their victims will them. However, Loren fully intended to be caught while still taking measures for damage control. I give the ending points for novelty if nothing else, although I suppose that it might be an attempt to conform to the Hayes Code while still giving the villain a win.

Now, I realize that from the tone of this review, it probably sounds like I’ll say that no one should watch this movie. However, the opposite is true! It’s 75 minutes long; much shorter than a lot of modern B-movies. It also has some real talent, and many of the cheap scares pack more of a punch than any shark-filled tornado. I highly recommend this movie for Halloween, or any night when you don’t want to be bored.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #38 Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom was the movie identified in Scream 4 as the first “Slasher” film on the basis that it was the first movie to put the audience in the killer’s perspective. I disagree strongly with this assessment, because to me, that isn’t what a “Slasher” is. I’ve always defined a “Slasher” based on killers who kill people in quick, brutal, graphic, and often creative ways. Peeping Tom, on the other hand, has the killer act in a much slower and almost meditative manner.

That said, I decided before writing this review to look up the articles on Wikipedia and TVTropes, and found that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consensus on what defines a “Slasher.” The most typical element they agree on seems to be that a “Slasher” is motivated by revenge. This is something I regard as typical, simply because it’s an easy motive to write, but not necessary. However, going by this definition, once again, Peeping Tom is not a “Slasher” film. The villain, while traumatized, does not believe that his victims have wronged him.

This is a movie that I could write volumes about. The killer is a complex character. The norm for killers is to either make them perfect charmers or social rejects. Mark (Carl Boehm), our killer, is socially awkward, due largely to the horrific experiences he had as a child. But he’s able to push his awkwardness aside and be charming when he needs to be. It makes him hard to read, as his reactions give off both compulsion and calculation.

He works as both a Hollywood camera man and a photographer of soft-core pornography. His behavior is noticeably different between the two jobs. When dealing with the nude models he’s more awkward and obtuse, while he tries to be friendlier when dealing with his co-workers at the film studio. Presumably, the commentary here is that he sees the former as beneath notice, and thus sees less reason to put on a mask for them.

Mark’s father was a biologist who experimented on Mark by filming him in stressful situations to study his reaction. These ranged from throwing a lizard into his bed to filming him as he said goodbye to his dying mother. This gave Mark a strange obsession with capturing things on film, with a camera as his window to emotionally distance himself from the world. Therefore, he films his victims as they die, holding up a mirror to them so that they grow even more horrified at the terror of their own expressions. His weapon is a sharp blade on one of the legs of his camera tripod, making the camera itself literally deadly.

Mark’s shell is cracked by Helen (Anna Massey), a young woman who rents a room with her blind mother in his home. Helen was not even aware that Mark was her landlord, as he inherited the house from his father and lives in a room like one of the tenants. Helen begins a romance with Mark, not knowing that he’s a killer, but knowing that he’s been damaged by his father and wanting to help him form a more normal relationship. We already know Helen’s attempts to get through to him are doomed though, and that Mark is too far gone.

Mark commits three murders over the course of the film, and it’s to the film’s credit that director, Michael Powell manages to make each one unique. The first murder, and the only one in which we see the moment of death (despite the lack of blood) is a prostitute who Mark kills simply because she was a convenient victim. The second is a woman who works as a stand-in on the studio film Mark is working on. This murder follows an elaborate dance sequence, as she thinks she’s helping Mark make a movie of his own.

The final murder seems to be a sort of suicide-by-cop scenario. Mark knows that he’s been followed by the police, and kills one of the nude models he works with during a session, apparently with the intent of leading the police to him. This murder we’re never shown at all, Mark closes the shutters, approaches the woman and the scene fades to black. He then creates a finale for what he calls his “documentary” by killing himself on his own tri-pod blade while the cameras roll.

This finale is complicated by Helen’s discovery of his films. She attempts to convince Mark to give himself up to the police rather than go through with his suicide. These scenes should be required viewing in Film School for how to do exposition correctly. Mark gives Helen a lecture on his theory that the scariest thing in the world is fear itself, and shows her the mirror he makes his victims look into. However, this doesn’t come across as a data-dump, as we’re shown Helen’s desperation to know and Mark’s reluctance to expound, giving emotional weight to the revelation. We’re shown what’s significant to him and what drives him as a character, rather than simply being given a bland explanation of what has happened.

The scene that the movie is best known for is likely Helen’s mother (Maxine Audley) breaking into Mark’s apartment to talk to him. We believe Mark is going to kill her, but she’s unable to see what’s on his films, and he eventually lets her go. However, the two of them create a dynamic that’s like fire and ice. Mark is obsessed with the visual and lacks emotional connections, while the mother (she’s never identified by name) uses her other senses to understand Mark in a way no one else does, seeing him as a danger to her daughter and asking him to leave her alone. She can tell by his movements and by his tone that he’s dangerous, sneaky and up to no good. You could debate whether she knows he’s a murderer, but I feel she did. When Mark promises never to film her daughter, she says she doesn’t want him to get the chance, indicating she knows that he kills the women he films.

This movie infamously destroyed Michael Powell’s career because it was considered so shocking in 1960. I don’t think that it’s ‘shocking’ today, but it is legitimately frightening. It’s a horror movie about ideas, in which the killer is aware of his own twisted mind. Not in a self-serving or self-justifying way, he never attempts to justify his actions, but rather, as an acceptance of himself as evil.

This is an amazing movie. If you don’t see it, then you’ve done yourself a great injustice. Never let me say that a movie is “not simply horror,” as I would never seek to marginalize my own favorite genre. However, this is indisputably a great film. It’s not a “Slasher” film by my definition, but it’s up there with Psycho in the annals of horror.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #39 Dawn of the Dead

(Author’s note: Dawn of the Dead as a parody of consumerism has been so thoroughly discussed that I decided it was better to simply not bother with it. There have literally been college courses taught on this premise, and I have nothing new to say on it.)

George Romero has said that the social commentary in Night of the Living Dead was accidental, but once he realized what he’d done, he had to continue it for the remainder of the Dead series. I think most people would agree that, at the minimum, he’d overplayed his hand by the fourth film, Diary of the Dead, and simply become too blatant. However, the second film, Dawn of the Dead, is an undisputed masterpiece.

To really set this movie apart from Night, Romero set up a group of protagonists who could be far more effective than the everyman heroes of the previous film. Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger) were both SWAT team members, while Stephen (David Emge) is a helicopter pilot for a local news station who allows them greater mobility (limited by the helicopter’s fuel). The final member of the main cast is Francine (Gaylen Ross), another staff member from the news station who, while initially lacking any notable skills, is quick to learn both the use of guns, and how to fly the helicopter.

The movie uses these abilities to underscore one point: The zombies are of absolutely no threat, as long as the protagonists work together and remain rational. The protagonists are able to fortify themselves and acquire guns. Under no circumstances could the zombies out think them. Only recklessness, and human stupidity could possibly allow the zombies to overcome these heavily armed and fortified individuals... but fortunately, humans have such stupidity in spades.

Roger gets stupid roughly halfway through the movie due to his own personal arrogance. As a result, he is bitten. This feels quite natural. He’s not a machine, and he’d eventually ceased to see the zombies as a serious threat as they’d failed to kill any of the main characters up to that point. Even after he’s bitten, Roger continues to believe against all reason that he can fight through the transformation into a zombie. Peter’s eventual decision to kill him leaves us creepily uncertain of whether or not his boast was legitimate. He shoots him just as his skin turns gray and he begins to growl, but before he’s able to show any signs of aggression.

So, we trust each other until someone becomes a burden? If so, then why should we ever trust anyone at all, if they’ll inevitably turn on us when we need them the most? The movie rubs our face in this paradox. The characters can only survive by working together, but what reason do they have to work together if their cooperation is dependent on their value to the group? Romero doesn’t even pretend that there’s an easy answer to this. Instead, he shows us rationality balanced against empathy in a sadistic tango.

The remaining three are then confronted by a group of bikers who storm the mall, allowing the zombies to enter. This section of the film reminds me of the controversy during Hurricane Katrina when the media reported a white couple as “finding” food at a local grocery store, while a black individual was “looting.” While the race issues aren’t present, there seems to be an element of stereotyping, and arguably of class. The bikers storm into the mall and begin taking things. This is literally no different from what the protagonists have been doing for most of the film and Peter wants to simply let them pass. The mall still has plenty of defensible positions, and the bikers’ raid will matter little if they remain smart and avoid the zombies. However, Stephen insists that the mall is “ours,” and forces a gunfight with the bikers, resulting in needless bloodshed and his own death.

The movie was originally supposed to end with Peter and Francine committing suicide, realizing that human survival in this world was simply impossible. Romero decided that he liked the characters too much, and so they flew away with what little fuel was left in the helicopter to an unknown fate. This is another point of contention among fans, but I feel the ending works. Human life is to be savored, even if it’s likely to be fleeting.

This is a movie to be seen. It’s best watched as a follow-up to Night, as the two movies together allow you to observe the escalation. We start with a mob in one film, which escalates into an army in the second. The quality of the later movies in the Dead series can be debated, but no film buff’s experience is complete without those two.

Wednesday Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I was somewhat concerned that I would come into Pride and Prejudice and Zombies at something of a disadvantage. I listened to the audiobook some years back when I had a car trip, and remember the plot mostly in broad strokes. I've never read the original Pride and Prejudice in any form, and have only seen bits of the adaptations.

That said, enough of the film is original that it's easy for me to see there wasn't a lot of interest in faithfulness beyond the basic joke. The fate of Mr. Wickham, in particular, is absolutely nothing like either book. In fact, as far as I can tell, virtually everything in the final act is connected to Jane Austen in only the vaguest ways.

I'm inclined to say that the novel would have been difficult to film. The movie effectively changes the genre of the story. Seth Grahame-Smith created a farce, where the plot of Pride and Prejudice happened almost unaltered, despite the presence of the undead and the Kung Fu skills of the Bennett sisters. Particularly in a post-Seltzer and Friedberg world, where spoofs are so widely viewed as cheap humor, I'd question how accepting the audience would be of this kind of story.

In this version the undead are treated as a very real threat, and seriously alter the events of the story into something of an exploitation film. Also, newly turned zombies apparently become evil and start eating brains before they lose their intelligence, so we do get some creepy scenes of zombified individuals talking quite intelligently to their would-be victims. There's even some discussion of making peace with the undead.

While this is probably the best route that could have been taken with a film adaptation, sadly there are still some fairly major problems. The film feels like it should be longer, although I don't know who would sit through a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film that significantly crossed the 2-hour mark. Many of the events of the original novel seem to just happen here because they have to, without appropriate build-up. Furthermore, on the zombie side I feel like much of the exposition is rushed, and desperately in need of more world building.

It's not a bad film, and does manage to score some real laughs, and a few decent scares. However, it's far from the comedic masterpiece I imagine many people would imagine it to be. Then again, I doubt that film could even exist in any form longer than an SNL skit.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #40 Black Sunday

(Disclaimer: With most foreign language films, I try to watch them once in the native language to see the performances as intended, and once dubbed into English in order to better follow the plot. However, I found out that this film was changed substantially between the original version and the dub. So, because the original list makes it clear they’re addressing the dub, I’m going with that. And I’ll be crediting the actors physically portraying the role, not the voices.)

I really don’t get how this film got its reputation as a classic. I suppose the blurry imagery might be the result of me watching a low-quality copy. But even beyond that, it seems quite generic. Asa Vadja (Barbara Steele), a Witch killed in Moldavia in the 1600s with her servant and lover Javuto (Arturo Dominici), returns from the grave. She also doubles as a Vampire, and the words “Witch” and “Vampire” are used fairly interchangeably throughout the film. Combining the two might have been interesting, but only if we were given a clear explanation for the rules. Instead, the only really interesting subversion is that Vampires are now killed by crosses being plunged through one of their eyes, rather than with wooden stakes through their hearts. Did Asa choose to worship Satan as a Vampire, or was she bitten and turned into a Witch? I haven’t a clue, although she apparently has no problem converting others via her bite.

Beyond that, the movie often comes across as goofy, but not goofy enough to actually be funny. Asa is awoken when two traveling doctors, Thomas (Andrea Checchi) and Andre (John Richardson) wander into her tomb. They break the cross over her coffin and the window that was put there to allow her to see it (...because the Power of Christ cannot move through opaque surfaces, apparently), and for God knows what reason, remove her mask Thomas cuts himself and the blood drips into her mouth, awakening her and Javuto. So basically, this was a slap-stick routine, only without the comedy.

We eventually find out that Asa plans on gaining eternal life by draining the blood of Katia (also played by Steele), her distant grand-niece. Or maybe she’s draining her energy. I’m not really sure how the rules for that work either. But okay, it’s Italian horror, it doesn’t make sense. I suspect the “Witch” aspect was added to make Asa a more clear villain for the film, implying that she’d chosen to be evil, rather than being turned against her will. Pretty much everything that she does fits more closely with her role as a “Vampire.”

The eventual defeat of Asa is carried out by Andre, now in love with Katia, while Katia herself is unconscious. This clearly represents a massive lost opportunity. The opening scene established that Asa was originally condemned by her own brother, almost certainly Katia’s ancestor. Her obsession with Katia should then, logically, have at least some aspect of revenge. However, instead of showing the two squaring off, Katia is used as a generic damsel in distress throughout the film, and the story closes with her being rescued.

The music of this movie comes across as fairly weak as well, often being misused to kill the mood of a given scene. For example, when Katia is first bitten and receives treatment from Andre, the music tells us this is romantic, rather than frightening. Obviously such a scene can be used to build up sexual tension, but treating someone’s Vampire bite should not be dealt with so casually. Furthermore, when the movie does deliver even minor shocks, it often punctuates it with music that goes over-the-top, as if director Mario Bava invented the unnecessary jump-scare decades early.

Of all the Italian films on this list, this is the one with which I was the least impressed by far. None of them make a lot of sense, but most of them draw you in with creative visuals so that you don’t really care about the plot. However, this movie lacks that level of creativity, instead giving us a second-rate Dracula. And therefore, this is one of the few movies on this list that I generally don’t recommend.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #41 The Hills Have Eyes

With many of the movies on this list, I struggle to write enough. But with The Hills Have Eyes, I feel that I’m going to be unable to deal with all of my feelings, due to the large number of memorable characters that I could talk about. The simplest way of expressing my delight at this movie is simply to say that it scared me. Not merely that I found it scary in some abstract way, but that I actually felt fear coming from the screen in front of me while watching this movie.

The premise of the film is that an extended family, the Carters, (an elderly couple, their two children, their spouses and a newborn grandchild) take a detour on their trip to California. They want to search the area of an old silver mine, thinking it might be fun to try to find some silver for the grandparents’ anniversary. They’re warned by Fred (John Steadman), the owner of a desert convenience store to stay on the main road. But obviously, because this is a horror film, his advice goes unheeded as they stumble into an Air Force bomb testing range, go off the road when they’re bombed, and ending up stuck in the middle of nowhere. Then, they fall prey to a family of cannibals, led by the vicious Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth).

Before the attack comes, Big Bob (Russ Grieve) departs the main group to try to get help from the convenience store. There, he finds out from Fred that Jupiter is Fred’s son, who burned his own sister to death. Fred beat his son with a tire iron and left him in the desert to die. However, Jupiter didn’t die, and in fact kidnapped a woman and started a cannibal clan living in the desert, preying upon anyone who happened through. We’re told that Jupiter’s wife (Cordy Clark) is a “whore,” and thus unmissed. She actually seems quite willing to stay with him, without any real explanation of why she converted to his way of thinking. This movie doesn’t really have the best female characters, so I’m not going to waste my time looking for an explanation there.

Jupiter attacks the gas station, killing Bob and Fred as his children attack the trailer. While the relationship between Jupiter and Fred was probably my favorite part of this film, I think the decision to kill Fred off was well-founded. It’s a case of less-is-more. It’s established through Jupiter’s daughter Ruby (Janus Blythe) that the cannibals were trading with Fred and that he was covering up their existence. Furthermore, when telling Jupiter’s story, Fred clearly takes great pains to never refer to Jupiter as his son. But on at least one occasion, Jupiter refers to him (posthumously) as “Grandpa Fred” and mockingly chants “Da-dy” after killing him. I think the way their relationship developed is something best left to our imagination.

Two of the women in the group are killed by two of Jupiter’s sons Mars (Lance Gordon) and Pluto (Michael Berryman), and the grandchild is kidnapped to be eaten. The assault on the trailer is the most intense part of the film by far. Berryman’s appearance is often cited as highly effective, but I actually found Gordon to be more frightening. Mars seems to view the world purely in terms of physical conflict, berating the Carter family for being too weak to stop them. I believe Mars actually serves as a contrast to Jupiter. Jupiter seems much more calculating, and we understand that he’s someone who was exposed to civilized life and rejected it. While in contrast to this, Mars never had the chance to even understand what it is to be human.

I should probably also mention that Jupiter has another son, Mercury (Arthur King), who seems to be mentally handicapped... I’ve now mentioned him. He doesn’t play a big enough role in the movie to discuss further.

The early-to-mid parts of this film remind me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s fairly little blood, and much of the horror is implied. We never see the cannibals kill the Carter’s dog, Beauty. It feels very real, like the movie knows it doesn’t have to try to scare you, because it scares you by its mere presence.

After the initial assaults, the movie does go downhill. Wes Craven apparently considered killing the baby. However, his entire crew threatened to walk off the set if he did so, meaning that there are no further deaths in the Carter family after that point. Ruby eventually turns on her family and helps protect the baby, and we get a final act that features fast-acting rattlesnake venom, obviously fake rocks being thrown around, and one of the most contrived traps in film history.

The move never sinks to the level of being “bad,” but to go from such a raw, brutal, grisly reality, to cheese in the final act is a bit of a buzz kill. Notably, the movie ends merely with the antagonists being defeated. The Carter family is never shown escaping the desert. I suppose Ruby, now allied with them, at least knows enough survival skills to keep them alive walking out. I’m aware there’s a sequel, but I’m also aware that Craven has publicly apologized for that sequel, so I don’t really consider it canon.

Of all the Wes Craven films to make this list (more than any other director), this is probably the least-good. However, that’s a little like saying “the poorest Billionaire.” Craven is a Master, and this is definitely a film that has earned its place in cinema history.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #42 An American Werewolf in London

An American Werewolf in London is the definitive werewolf movie. All werewolf movies from before it were merely precursors, and all later werewolf movies are merely successors. It has everything a horror movie needs; good characters, a mythology that’s interesting and original, but which doesn’t overload the story, and a plot that unfolds at just the right pace.

The movie opens with two American students, Jack and David (Griffin Dunne and David Naughton), who are backpacking through England and who stop at an out-of-the way pub. After an unpleasant exchange, the nervous locals send them on their way, despite knowing that there’s a werewolf on the loose and that they’re putting the young men in danger. However, the locals’ conscience eventually gets the better of their spite, and they come out, guns blazing, and shoot the werewolf just in time for Jack to die and David to be bitten. (Although, if the werewolf could be shot and killed so easily, I’m actually surprised they hadn’t already dealt with him).

There’s one major element that was added to the werewolf mythology in this movie, the fact that a werewolf sees the ghosts of people killed by him or members of his werewolf bloodline. So during his recovery from the attack, David sees his friend Jack, whose ghost decays as the month passes as if he still had a physical body. Jack tells him that he’s now a werewolf, and that he must kill himself to save others and free Jack’s spirit. This element is a little confusing if you think about it. For it to be true, it would mean in all the time since the first werewolf to ever roam the Earth, not one single member of David’s bloodline had ever taken a life before Jack? Why aren’t their armies of ghouls? Or perhaps the others decided to just let the ones who’d be especially meaningful to David appear to him as a voluntary act (his friend who was killed by the werewolf who turned him, and then later, his own victims).

Obviously, David questions his own sanity. During his recovery he also hooks up with a nurse named Alex (Jenny Agutter) who reassures him that he’s just hallucinating due to his survivor’s guilt. She’s not the best female lead I’ve seen, but I see nothing particularly objectionable about her performance. She’s there to be a nurturing figure to David when he’s in emotional turmoil, and she does her job admirably.

The movie is probably best remembered for its transformation sequence. Director John Landis and makeup artist Rick Baker both felt that the kind of physical changes a werewolf would undergo would be agony, and it shows in this sequence. David is twisted and contorted in every way imaginable. It’s actually surprising that more modern werewolf films don’t try to copy this formula. The only one I can think of that did so was Underworld, and that movie included a throwaway line saying that it was only the first transformation that was painful. I suppose most modern films satisfy themselves with the psychological horror of becoming an animal, not that this movie is lacking in that element.

The movie benefits from the fact that it mixes humor with the horror, rather than being so dark that we find ourselves detached. Jack is always friendly and happy to joke with David, even as he begs David to end his life. After his first rampage, David wakes up in a zoo, naked, and has to steal a bunch of balloons from a little boy to cover his genitals as he runs home. The scene could have been taken right out of a comedy! (And a better one than most.) There’s also a later conversation between David, Jack and the victims of his first rampage in which they helpfully list ways in which he could kill himself, trying to think of the most convenient method, that leaves me laughing out loud.

Of course, an actual suicide would be an anti-climax. So instead, the film ends with David in werewolf form being gunned down by the police. (No, they don’t use silver bullets.) Alex cries over his body, credits roll and happy music play. And you sit there, happy that at least David’s suffering is over.

I can’t recommend this movie enough. Even if you’re not interested in it as a horror film, it’s an excellent movie all around. The emotional whiplash is used to great effect. It’s a fine film from beginning to end.

On a final note though, why the Hell do this movie’s credits include a congratulations to Princess Diana and Prince Charles on their then-recent wedding? I mean, I know the movie was filmed in the UK, but did every film made there congratulate them for a period of time? Were they really going to feel a great deal of love being thanked by a werewolf movie? Just, whose idea was that?