Strange Comforts

It's odd how things work out.

I knew I was going to be a few days late getting to Hail Horror 4; my business trip to Texas turned out to be a lot more draining than I thought, and every day I was home turned into something that needed to be addressed with the family, whether it was my wife's grandmother's 90th birthday party, my son's first day of nursery school, and a lot of prep work for a job I'm currently pursuing that's far outside the type of work I do now. Nevertheless, I was finally at a place where I was ready to go, I had in fact ditched the first movie I saw (Werner Herzog's remake of NOSFERATU, which I liked but couldn't generate enough of a reaction to write about) and settled on another to kick things off.

When I got the call from my brother, who lives down in Florida a few minutes away from my father, he explained that my father was in the hospital. In the middle of the night he suffered a mild heart attack. He thought nothing of it, and went back to bed. He had his second a few hours later and, rather than do the smart thing and wake his wife, or call 9-1-1, he decided to drive himself to the airport.

Leaving his car he collapsed in the parking lot, his third heart attack in 12 hours. The hospital staff found him and rushed him into the emergency room.

That was Monday. Now it's Wednesday, and things are the same. He flat-lined yesterday, and was resuscitated. Today they're going in to see what's going on. And I've had a little time to come to grips with what's going on, and the weird thing I found myself going to the stack of horror movies sitting on top of the television cabinet.

This isn't the first time I've found horror to be a comfort. When my wife was pregnant with our son, she went into labor eight weeks early, and was forced to stay in the hospital for four weeks. It was early May outside, the sun shining through the growing buds on the trees, but inside it was FRIDAY THE 13TH, HALLOWEEN, and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.

Maybe the real draw of horror is that at times we're compelled to wipe away the pain and terror in our lives, and one way to do that is to expose ourselves to something even more gruesome and terrifying. Maybe it's a chance to escape, to see someone handle the unknown and unexplainable so that we can better cope with our own hurdles.

At any rate, it looks like the first entry will be up tonight, with more to come by week's end.

Delays

I didn't intend to start Hail Horror 4 this late, but sometimes life decides to punch you dead in the face when you least expect it. Llast night my father had three heart attacks, and the idea of watching horror films doesn't seem so appetizing at the moment.

As soon as I know what's going on I'll be back to kick things off properly.

C.H.U.D. (1984)

After reviewing C.H.U.D. last year I was afraid to re-visit any of my cherished kid movies for a while...what would happen if it turns out ICE PIRATES with Robert Urich isn't as good either?! #9 in the 3/4 done Hail Horror 4 prelude.

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C.H.U.D. is a great example of how time can play tricks on the mind. I hadn't seen the film since I was a kid, maybe 15, 16 years old. All I could remember was the unbelievably awesome acronym: Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. Which pretty much said it all, really. The only other thing I recalled was really bad, tongue-in-cheek kind of humor.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Not about it being bad; C.H.U.D. is pretty awful. But its awfulness stems from its absolute earnestness around the plot. This is a damn serious movie, despite how tacky and cheesy it is at times. And it gets even weirder when you see such stars as Daniel Stern, John Heard, and even a brief appearance by John Goodman, who can't hide his charm even when he's playing a loser cop at a diner for less than a minute of screen time.

For those of you that blocked it out of your minds, C.H.U.D. is about a group of missing persons in the city, mostly homeless people called "undergrounders," who live in the sewer systems. When a cop's wife also goes missing, he begins an investigation involving the head of a soup kitchen (Stern, in full afro mode) and a photographer (Heard) who had made a name for himself shooting a series of photo essays on the homeless. They eventually learn that a bill to move toxic waste through the city was being appealed , and in the meantime the waste has been just sitting there, underground. Slowly the Undergrounders have been turning into vicious radioactive monsters who are no longer content to remain underground. C.H.U.D. is the name given to the creatures in a classified file on the beasts.

There are som gross-out moments, mostly focusing on bodies ripped in half and one scene where a clogged shower drain suddely shoots out a geyser of blood that rivals A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's classic Johnny Depp death scene. But the C.H.U.D.'s are very much Man-in-Suit types: you can envision where the zippers are. I read one review where they likened the creatures to Sloth in THE GOONIES, which isn't really too far off the mark. Their eyes glow like big orange bulbs, they jump out and pose menacingly before killing you, and in one bizarre case they stretch their necks out in some weird, phallic pose that's outright laughable:

Stern and Heard are both pretty decent considering what they're up against - Heard in particular tries to wring everything he can out of his scenes with his pregnant girlfriend. But that's not enough for a movie tries too hard to send multiple social messages instead of just being scary good fun.

In the end you get strangled dogs, decapitated homeless people, and lots of hands coming out of man hole covers. You find out that C.H.U.D. in fact stands for something other than Cannibalisitic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, but you won't care because in the end that's what it HAS to stand for; it's the best thing about the movie.

Hatchet (2007)

A couple notes concerning my review of HATCHET, #8 in the prelude to Hail Horror 4. It was written in response to a film request from a friend of mine, and was viewed (and reviewed) while more than a little intoxicated. I decided not to revise it, as that would possibly entail me having to re-watch the film again. Writer/Director Adam Green is currently being hailed as one of the rising stars of horror, and I have to admit that his collection of shorts done with Joe Lynch (WRONG TURN 2) for this year's FrightFest are wickedly funny, so it's possible I just wasn't in the mood for this kind of thing when I saw it.

Or maybe not. It could just suck.

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NOTE: I should mention that in hindsight the character of the swamp guide was so ridiculous he made me laugh. So factor that in when you decide whether or not to see HATCHET.

This one's for Sean, who loaded up his Netflix queue with horror films he was interested in and told me to take my pick. So before I talk about 2007's HATCHET, directed by Adam Green, here is a personal message to Sean:

"Hi Sean! Hope you're doing well - Jack misses you, so stop by soon! Oh, and by the way - you have some fantastic horror films in your queue. At a glance I can whole-heatedly recommend films like ROGUE, DANCE OF THE DEAD (obviously) BASKET CASE (which I hope to review next week), the original BLACK CHRISTMAS, and GINGER SNAPS, which I adore. Please, PLEASE consider these options very carefully before taking a look at HATCHET. You've been warned..."

Why do I say that? Because the poster's tag line of "Old Fashioned American Horror" roughly translates to "low-budget 80's throwaway that stars someone who looks and acts roughly like the dude who stars in that show Chuck". And while I can understand the film as a sort of reaction to the glut of PG-13 stuff that passes itself off as "horror" nowadays, HATCHET relies on simple devices like silly music and purposeful overacting for humor that feels more tired than funny. And the horror, when it does come, is pretty much like everything else you've seen in the mid 80's, just not as scary. Or good.

In short: a motley crew of tourists take an illegal nighttime cruise in the swamps of New Orleans where they're terrorized by Victor Crowley, a deformed giant who was supposedly killed as a child when, after a childhood prank burns down his home, his father mistakenly slams a hatchet in his face trying to save him by breaking the door down. You have your lanky hero, a pair of porno starlets and their sleazy director, the hot loner chick who will eventually have a tender moment with said hero, and the obligatory black sidekick who's main role is to scream and toss off unfunny one-liners. That's it. People get picked off one by one in gore-infested ways until only one remains.

Or maybe not, because every horror movie nowadays needs that little "jump" at the end that was probably the first thing thought of by the screenwriter. And I'll admit that the ending to HATCHET is sly and kind of cool, but definitely not worth sitting through 90 minutes to get to. Very brief cameos by genre vets Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund and Tony "Candyman" Todd bring a little life but are in for too short a time to make any difference. Huge gaps in internal logic pervade every decision made in the film, the power of Victor Crowley is inconsistent and although the gore is pretty impressive for such a low-budget movie, the murder scenes are shot in an over-the-top in a way that borders on the ridiculous.

Maybe drunk with a bunch of friends who don't care about anything other than tits and blood (both are offered in copious amounts) is the way to watch HATCHET. It doesn't have any of the terror that the movies it prides itself on being a part of (e.g. FRIDAY THE 13th, etc..) have, so what promises to be a refreshing change from the typical instead finds itself barely retreading water from 25 years instead of 5.

Re-Cycle (2006)

Business travel got the better of me, so pardon the lack of reviews over the past few days. I'll get a few up today, starting with this horror/fantasy from the Pang Brothers, who brought us THE EYE a few years back. #7 in our ramp-up to Hail Horror 4.

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In a weird, unsuccessful way the Pang Brothers are kind of hot in Hollywood right now. Having made a name for themselves in Asia with films like THE EYE and BANGKOK DANGEROUS, they made their US directing debut with the poorly received THE MESSENGERS, which tried to mix elements of the traditional "J-Horror" with a more Midwestern, American vibe. Both THE EYE and, more recently, BANGKOK DANGEROUS, have been given Hollywood makeovers, with the latter being adapted by the brothers themselves.

Surprise: the films tanked, and yet we still get a Region 1 release of their 2006 horror/fantasy film RE-CYCLE. Reuniting them with their EYE star Angelica Lee, I saw some incredible stills a few years ago but despaired of it ever coming around this neck of the woods. Although guilty of a few abrupt shifts in tone and editing, and some obvious CGI, RE-CYCLE turns out to be an interesting mix of ideas, taking the ghostly scares from horror and borrowing heavily from fantasy fare like THE WIZARD OF OZ and THE NEVERENDING STORY, layering fantastical images one upon the other.

Lee plays Ting-yin, a successful novelist whose new book, Re-Cycle, is a supernatural departure from her usual love stories. She begins to concoct her tale: a young woman with long hair being haunted, but writer's block and personal complications cause her to throw away her notes in frustration. Soon after she begins to notice strange things in her apartment: long strands of hair left on the counter, and movement out of the corner of her eye. The Pang Brothers shoot everything with an alarming clarity, often using extreme close-ups of everyday objects to emphasize the tension in the scene. They do well with the ghostly images as well: in one tense scene Ting-yin puts her head down to listen to odd noises emanating from her answering machine. When she picks her head back up, a blurry ghost head pick up its head a second later.

She later meets with an old lover who abandoned her years ago for another woman he got pregnant. Upset at the encounter and still freaked out over the disturbances in her apartment Ting-yin becomes lost, transported to a nightmarish world where everything deserted and abandoned winds up, and is being pursued by the remnants of the very character she tossed aside in the trash.

There are plenty of scare of the "jump" variety in RE-CYCLE, but the real fun comes in the Gilliam-esque (not really a word, but you know what I mean) images and scenery the Pang Brothers create. Seemingly right out of films like BARON MUNCHAUSIN and BRAZIL, we're treated to a basement straight of some urban version of Dante's Inferno, where evil things stutter and scream in darkened spaces, a building constructed entirely of books, a land of broken toys, and a decrepit amusement park impossibly situated between two apartment buildings:

An old man and a young girl aid her in her quest to return to the real world, and to tell you who these people are would be to spoil a large part of the movie. There's also a very disturbing section of the film where a significant abandonment issue is addressed, and we see that the implications of this episode have consequences that color the rest of the movie. Upon RE-CYCLE's release there was a lot of controversy around the film, many saying it was a thinly-veiled jab at abortion rights. But I think that's giving the film more of a reach than was intended - it feels much more like a narrative ploy to tie everything together into an obligatory "shock" ending. Which works, even if it's constructed out of ideas and images that are best taken as the stuff of dream and night terror rather than any tangible sense of reality.

From a purely visual perspective I enjoyed RE-CYCLE. There were more than couple nice scares (again, it was the "loud noise and jump" variety but that's okay) and there's plenty of eye-candy on display - Color and its conspicuous absence are used masterfully throughout the movie and everyone does a fine acting job. If you enjoy your horror or fantasy with a healthy dose of the industrial, give RE-CYCLE a try. There's more than enough there to keep you entertained.