Masters of Horror: Episode 14 The Damned Thing

The Damned Thing is based on an old short-story by Ambrose Bierce. I've never read that story, and aside from the obvious updates I have no idea how closely this episode adheres to the original story. I bring up the original short-story only to save myself from comments left by readers who felt the need to share this information, under the impression that I didn't know.

This is an episode that gets worse in the re-watching. The first time through the creature seemed mysterious. But, watching it again, with an idea of how it ends, I just found it confusing. The creature was an oil monster that came to kill the descendants of the man who started an oil field in the 1930s. It can apparently attack as an invisible but corporeal force, cause people to kill themselves, cause people to kill each other, or just show up as oil and eat people. Why it needs such variety I don't understand. I'm also rather confused by why it's target seems to be the last person it attacks, plowing through the most of the town first.

The main character, Sheriff Kevin Reddle (Sean Patrick Flannery), is an excellent protagonist. It's like the episode got the hard part right, giving us an interesting protagonist, but screwed up the “scary monster chasing the hero” part. When he was a child his father killed his mother, and chased Kevin with a gun, before being killed by something the locals calls The Damned Thing. Now, Kevin is constantly paranoid, but still feels a need for a connection to the family he lost. So, he lives in his parents' home, but has rigged it up with extensive surveillance. He also dreads his own coming fortieth birthday, and the local priest (Ted Raimi) advises him to come in for confession. His paranoia eventually drove his wife Dina (Marisa Coughlan) to take their son Mikey (Alex Ferris) to live in a trailer instead.

Of course, The Damned Thing reappears with his birthday, and people in the town become both suicidal and homicidal overnight, and Kevin becomes increasingly violent. The Priest, interestingly, becomes violent in general, but also gains a determination to wipe out Kevin's bloodline to end the curse. While I'm not totally clear why some attackers seems incoherent, and others can focus their rage, I think it's effective enough to get me to suspend my disbelief. I'd say a bit too much of the havoc takes place off-screen, but what we get is decent enough.

The ending of the episode left me scratching my head, though. I have no idea if The Damned Thing wants to drag out the torment of Kevin's family, or is just doing whatever it feels like at the moment. Kevin's death has very little parallel with his father's. Kevin's father was attacked by The Damned Thing as an invisible force, Kevin is eaten by the aforementioned oil monster. Furthermore, the father's death marked the end of The Damned Thing's attack until Kevin's fortieth birthday. It's implied, however, that The Damned Thing killed Mikey and Dina immediately after Kevin. Bookends with a more clear parallel would have been far more effective here. Or at least give us a reason for the Damned Thing to want to end the bloodline now

I'm not going to say I hated this episode, but it's among the weakest of the series. It's certainly not fit to be the season premiere. It lacks the punch of Tobe Hooper's usual work, and feels more like a cut-rate Mick Garris/Stephen King miniseries slashed down to an hour, and without King's writing talent.

Masters of Horror: Episode 3 Dance of the Dead

Returning to this show, there were three epiosdes of Masters of Horror that immediately came to mind before I even starterd watching: Homecoming, The Washingtonians, and Dance of the Dead. Dance stands out for a reason: It's a story about the hororr of giving up on humanity. A post-apocalyptic world where people still go through the motions of keeping the lights on, but beneath it all there's little human decency left.

The story takes place after World War III and a series of terrorist attacks have introduced a new chemical weapon: Blizz. It's a substance that can be mixed with clouds to produce a rain of ashes that burn any living thing they touch. Millions have died, and the rule of law is implied to still technically exist, but be very loosely enforced. Money and property rights still exist, there's even a reference to “paying rent,” but property seems to be just about the only right accepted.

The main character is Peggy (Jessica Lowndes), a naïve young woman who lives and works at a diner owned by her mother, Kate (Marilyn Norry), who sees Peggy as her last hope of normality now that her sister and father have both passed away. They live in a world where owning a diner is the equivalent of winning the lottery. To make them even luckier, it's implied the diner doesn't even turn a profit, but Kate insists Peggy's father left them some money.

Trying to get a better understanding of the world, Kate runs off with a young man named Jak (Jonathan Tucker) to the town of Muskeet, a place primarily inhabited by bikers, gangs, and drug addicts. There, a club called the Doom Room, run by “the MC” (Robert Englund), puts on shows displaying “the Dance of the Dead,” performed by LUEs (Lifeless Undead Phenomenon), the corpses of young men and women who overdosed on a stimulant developed to keep soldiers fighting during the War. Their bodies continue to spasm long after their death, so they use electric prods to make dead bodies “dance.”

Peggy recognizes her sister Anna (Melena Ronnis) as one of the animated corpses, and she and Jak try to tak her body. The MC chases them down, and there's an encounter with Kate who followed them to Muskeet. The MC reveals that Kate sold him Anna when she overdosed, because Kate was tired of dragging her home every week. This sale, not a deceased father, is the source of all of Kate's money. Peggy agrees to trade the wounded Kate for Anna's body, and gives it a proper burial with Jak, joining him as a resident of Muskeet.

This episode says a lot by way of implication. It's probably a better depiction of human nature than almost any other I've ever seen. The apocalypse did not create a Mad Max scenario, because that would be a situation from which no one benefits. Rather, the apocalypse brings a world in which the weak and the old have little recourse for their grievances, as society pushes on just enough to maintain itself. Maintaining a civilization is, ironically, the most primal of human instincts, and we really don't care who gets bulldozed in the construction of that civilation. We see that Blizz survivors are persona non grata, and that the old are used as a source of plasma to keep LUPs functional. Everyone knows that they'll eventually be destroyed by the society they live in, but it's not like an individual's choice to change is going to fix anything, so why bother?

Of course Englund is always amazing. Here he gives us a far more morally dubious character than Freddy. He's honest, but completely and unapologetically out for himself. He comes across as a character above good and evil, despite being completely human. He's effectively the Devil come to collect his due from those who have sinned...which is literally every character in this world. At one point one of Jak's friends says that the Dance is “what happens to people like me.” These people are in hell, with a stay on their punishment for as long as they're strong, young and attractive, or at least rich enough to feed themselves. They either accept or denying that nothing good can come from a world devoid of compassion.

The final scene, Peggy as a Muskeet girl while her mother dances, is probably one of the most touching and disturbing in the the entire series. It's an acceptance of a sad reality. She knows she's doomed, and chooses to live that life. But we still see the conflict in her eyes as she waits for her punishment to come in a world where she knows she can expect nothing different. There is no good choice, no action that does not harm others, and no chance of salvation. The world continues on, as civilization crushes souls.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #5 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I made a trip to Texas for a few weeks. A friend of mine actually begged me not to go because she had just seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and was convinced I would be killed by Leatherface. I know that sounds silly, but it does tell you just how much this particular film can affect people.
 

With many of the films on this list, I find myself struggling to write enough for a review. With this film however, I find myself trying to decide what I actually need to say and what can be cut. (An early version of this review contained a rant about why the movie Cry Wolf bombed, just for some perspective.)  This is a film that affects everyone who sees it, and the mystique surrounding it is as great as the film itself.

This movie came out shortly after Black Christmas, when the slasher film was still in its infancy. As such, it’s often noted for not featuring many of the staples of the genre. Only one of the four protagonists is unlikable at all, and his constant whining is offset by the fact that he’s confined to a wheelchair. There’s fairly little blood and gore (reportedly Tobe Hooper wanted a PG rating), and the killer’s motives aren’t extensively explored. (Although we get more information about them than we did in Black Christmas, which made the killer’s identity and motives a complete enigma). The killers are also made out to be quite human. Even Leatherface, while strong, never shrugs off a gunshot or ploughs through an army the way Jason Vorhees routinely does.

The single most subtly bizarre thing in the movie is probably that the victims actually have a plot-relevant reason for traveling to the place of their deaths, rather than being “on vacation” or having some other half-assed reason to travel out to the middle of nowhere. Several graves have been robbed in a small, rural cemetary. So a girl named Sally (Marilyn Burns), her wheel-chair bound brother Franklin (Paul A Partain) and their friends Jerry (Allan Danzinger), Kirk (William Vail), and Pam (Teri McMinn) go to make sure their grandfather’s grave is still intact. The local gas station is out of gas and they don’t have enough to get home. So they decide to stay overnight at their grandfather’s house. Once there, they realize that the house next door has a gas generator, and they decide to send one of their group to ask if the residents could spare some gas to get them home.

Obviously, they quickly fall victim to Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), the mentally retarded vanguard of a family of cannibals. From that point on, the movie becomes an exercise in tension. By the end of the film, four of the five are dead, and the final survivor is likely insane. However, despite the low body count, not one death is wasted. One is stretched out to emphasize the suffering (the victim first impaled, then locked in a freezer to die of cold or suffocation), one is quick to emphasize surprise (the titular “chainsaw” murder), and the other two seems designed specifically to fall between these two extremes (killed with a hammer). So the movie uses the deaths perfectly to hit every button we have, rather than throwing everything at us to see what sticks.

The most famous scene is the dinner, at which the final survivor is tied to a chair, and tormented by the family. This scene is one of the most perfectly horrifying I’ve ever seen. All the characters communicate their roles flawlessly, and the villains actually seem to have no concept that what they’re doing is wrong. Leatherface doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand. Drayton (Jim Siedow), the older of his brothers, seems to see murder as a duty. Nubbins (Edwin Neal), the younger, sees it in the same way a child might see frying an ant with a magnifying glass. And then there’s “Grandfather” (John Dugan), who is so feeble that there’s literally no way to get a read on him or how much of what’s going on he even understands.

A lot of modern horror seems to shy away from using the ‘Other’ as the thing to be afraid of. I can understand this sentiment, as many in today’s world are afraid of inciting hatred against those who are different (a sentiment I fully share). Still, it’s kind of hard to deny that the ‘Other’ is effective as a way to induce fear. And the threats presented in the top five films on this list (in descending order) are, rednecks, an insane person, a demon, an alien and a shark. (I know it’s a spoiler, but this list is over a decade old anyway).

Leatherface makes an excellent ‘Other,’ and it’s hardly fair to expect one of the scariest movies ever made to be politically correct. I didn’t watch this movie to get a treatise on why rednecks deserve respect and compassion. And anyone who hasn’t seen this film and can handle it definitely should. It’s a part of cinema history.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #80 Poltergeist (1982)

Preface: I accept Tobe Hooper as the director of this film. Yes, Spielberg had a very strong creative role in the production of the movie. Producers often do. That does not make him the director. Shut up with your conspiracy theories, and stop hurting Hooper's career.

Everything's that's old is new again. In my second viewing of Poltergeist, I realized that I was watching Insidious made three decades earlier, with a happy ending... and then the sequel for Insidious gave us back the happy ending. So, really, the only difference between the two is that both Insidious movies combined have a longer running time, and Poltergeist caused more property damage, because the house was destroyed at the end.

The basic set-up of this movie is that a real estate agent (Craig T Nelson) and his family (JoBeth Williams as his wife, and Dominique Dunn, Oliver Robbins, and Heather O'Rourke as his children) are living in a neighborhood in which he is trying to sell homes, and comes under assault from a presence that wants to steal their children. This basic set-up allows for a number of freaky scenes that eventually culminates with the aforementioned destruction of the house. I somewhat suspect that the ending required the house to be destroyed simply because the entity had attacked them so many times and been repelled that any other ending would have left us with serious doubt as to whether it was actually gone, rather than simply in a momentary lull.

One frequent problem I have with reviewing these movies is that I have to separate “is scary” from “scares me.” There's certainly a distinction, as many things that others find freaky don't bother me in the slightest, and vice versa. In the case of this movie, the only scene that bothered me at all was when the father had to threaten his spectrally-kidnapped daughter (O'Rourke) with a spanking. While I don't have children, somehow I did relate to the issue. The father had to acknowledge himself as being more threatening to the child than the mother, since he was charged with discipline. The alternative to this acknowledgment was the loss of his daughter.

However, there are many other scenes that I do acknowledge as “scary.” In fact, the entire film is a long montage of the spirits doing bizarre and freaky things, up to and including kidnapping children into an alternate universe between life and death. That's not a criticism. I certainly don't expect otherworldly entities to behave in a manner that humans would find rational. So, their failure to do so makes perfect sense.

The thing that keeps us grounded in the plot is the human characters. Two parents are desperately trying to defend their children. That constant is what keeps us anchored within the movie; the transition of the characters from normality, to excitement at the possibility of the supernatural, to fear, to determination.

This movie is good, but often seems to lack direction, and really drags on too long. While I see the appeal, and would definitely recommend horror fans check it out, the remake actually entertained me more, simply because it did a better job of streamlining the plot. Still, I think my opinion is clearly in the minority here, and I definitely recommend checking the movie out.