Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven (August 2, 1939 – August 30, 2015)

I actually hated the movie The Serpent and the Rainbow. 97% of my hatred for it was due to the fact that I find Bill Pullman about as riveting as a lint trap. The other 3% has a lot to do with the fact that I find the practice of Vodou and all of its variations - Obeah, Santeria, Palo Mayombe, etc. - to be incredibly beautiful and demanding of awe and respect. I'm not a religious person at all, but frankly Vodou scares the shit out of me. Doesn't stop me from pinning photos of Baron Samedi and Marie Leveau onto my Pinterest boards, but I'm not about to start summoning loas or purchasing grave dirt like a stupid white person. You don't mess with that shit. You just don't.

That said, I found TS&TR to be incredibly silly and not scary at all. I didn't give a shit about Bill Pullman. Stupid scrawny ass honky goes wandering into Haiti not respecting shit and gets what he deserves, idiot.

I read the book of the same title and found it as boring as burned toast, so I understand the need to create drama, shock and horror where there wasn't any to begin with. I understand too that American audiences have preconceived notions about what Vodou really is. They expect snakes and spiders, bonfires and chanting and lascivious black women in flowing white dresses, gyrating madly to bongo drums. Fine, whatever.

I've actually never seen a horror film about "voodoo" that I really liked. The Believers, Angel Heart, fucking Skeleton Key...I mean, all of them have nice ambiance and stuff but somehow, they all just fall short of the mark. They overdo it on the freaky shit and underplay the sincerity of the practice itself.

But I'm veering way off topic here. I'm supposed to be paying tribute to the late great Wes Craven, who unexpectedly died yesterday at the age of 76 from brain cancer. I didn't even know he was sick, let alone suffering from such a vicious form of the ultimate malady. Shit, I didn't even know he was 76. He has - had - a serious case of baby face.

I never met Craven, but he was part of the Horror Triumvirate that I grew up with throughout the 70s and 80s. Him, John Carpenter and George Romero were my childhood idols. Haven't met Carpenter either. Met Romero once! I was drunk as hell but he was sweet as pie. Wait, sorry - veering off topic again.

That's okay though because there's really no point to this post. It's not about anything, I just wanted to talk about Wes Craven's films; the ones I hated, the ones I loved and even the ones I thought were just "meh." I really don't think he'd mind. Unlike a lot of people in the film business, Craven didn't strike me as a pretentious asshole. After all, this was the guy who once said: "I thought there would never be a sequel (to A Nightmare On Elm Street). Boy was I stupid."

So, excluding the already discussed Serpent and the Rainbow, here is a list of all of the Wes Craven films I have seen and my unasked for opinion on each one. If it ain't listed, I didn't watch it, so shut up.

The Last House on the Left 

Holy fucking shit. I rented this movie when I was 18, knowing nothing about it except that it had been directed by the guy who had done A Nightmare On Elm Street. This is a deeply sick and upsetting movie. It cannot be enjoyed. I can't conceive of anyone actually owning this and watching it numerous times. "Unpleasant" is an understatement. That said, I actually did watch this one twice - once when I rented it at the age of eighteen, and again when I had to review it and felt that too much time had passed to base my review on memory. Both times, I took a long hot shower afterwards. Much like I Spit On Your Grave, this is effective as an anti-violence vehicle by being as unglamorously violent as possible. Even the killers look sickened.

The Hills Have Eyes 

snerk, I accidentally misspelled that as The Hills Have Eeyes and it looked like The Hills Have Eeyores. Now that would be frightening. Anyway,I liked the premise of this one - nuclear family VS. nuked family. Looks really badly dated now and moves a bit slow in places - how long can we sit and watch Papa Jupiter and Michael Berryman jog through the desert? - but still, a strong statement about violence and the illusion of civilization.

The Hills Have Eyes 2

This one gets no accompanying picture.
Because it sucked the fart out of a dead mutants asshole.

Deadly Blessing

Craven's mom was a religious nutzoid, hence his abhorrence for strict, puritanical rule.Some of the best things in the world have come from strict religious upbringings, i.e. Maynard James Keenan and...um...Maynard James Keenan. I'll give this one props for the Spider Swallow scene, featuring a very young Sharon Stone. Also for the snake in the bathtub scene, which would be repeated in A Nightmare On Elm Street with razor fingers instead of a garden variety rattler (or whatever the fuck species it was). Interesting premise, although I will never be able to fully scrub the afterimage of a sweaty Ernest Borgnine frenziedly whipping a young man. Yick.

A Nightmare On Elm Street

It looks dated now and some of the acting has gone from wooden to stone cold petrified, but God I loved this movie. Still do. Such an amazing concept, such an original boogeyman. I had a full color poster of Freddy Krueger on my bedroom wall for years. I was such a diehard, dedicated fan that years later I did some digging that no one else had yet done and wrote THIS article, which went viral (my fifteen minutes of fame, yeehaw) and then promptly got plagiarized. But dammit, I was there first.

Deadly Friend

He liked the word "deadly" didn't he?
Anyway, this one was cute. I was 16 when this came out and remember renting it to watch at a slumber party with a bunch of girlfriends. Honestly, I only remember bits and pieces of it, and couldn't be fucked to give it a re-watch before writing this, but I do remember the Basketball-in-the-Face being a great highlight. Best part of the movie, actually.

Shocker

Honestly, don't remember too much about this one, except being disturbed by the fact that Skinner from The X-Files was cussing and not wearing glasses. Also, omg the hair metal! Megadeth's cover version of Alice Cooper's No More Mr. Nice Guy (way too much Republicanism in there for me, considering Craven was a liberal), Dangerous fucking Toys and...does anyone even remember Saraya?




The People Under the Stairs

Didn't really care for this one. I liked the idea, I appreciated the casting of project dwelling, gangsta-livin', poverty stricken blacks as the heroes for a change, but the whole thing felt like a Tex Avery cartoon. Just a tad too over-the-top. Yeah, I get that it was supposed to be an urban fairy tale, but...just not my thing, I guess. I don't like the style. I didn't like it when Joe Dante did it for his "It's A Good Life" segment for the Twilight Zone movie either, even though I prefer that one to the diabetic treacle that was Speilberg's adaptation of "Kick The Can" (yeah, I got a can you can kick right here).

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Meh.
So much promise, so little development of the storyline or arc of the mythos.
Oh well.
Even Freddy looks too streamlined and snazzy. I prefer him as a dirty, ragged old pervo bum.

Scream

<--- That's better.

I know there are genre fans who hated everything this film represented, which was a total mocking of the horror genre, but I enjoyed the hell out of it the first time I saw it. I was impressed by the brutal Psycho-esque butchering of what we presume is the main character 5 minutes into the film. I appreciated the fact that I couldn't figure out who had done it. I wasn't  the horror expert then (cough) that I am now, but I liked it. Fucking sue me.

"She's got a bony ass... and fat thighs... and ugly skin."

Cursed

I love werewolf movies.
This one was...okay. Glad I had a free pass for it. But it had a lot to live up to, being a female werewolf movie following so closely behind Ginger Snaps, a female werewolf/menstruation film the likes of which hadn't been seen since The Company of Wolves. However, even if it failed to impress me as utterly as either Ginger or Company, it wins an award for Best GIF Ever to Come Out of a Female Werewolf Movie.

Red Eye

I had a free pass to this one too, but I would gladly have paid full price. This one was so much fun, and not just because Cillian Murphy does such a good, cold, smug-faced creep. Strong resourceful female + face-paced unrelenting action + AWESOME chase scene + a deep hatred for retail customers = WINNER.


So, thank you Mr. Craven. I may not have liked everything you did, but I can at least appreciate the ripples you created in the horror pool. You changed the genre forever, at a time when change was needed.

"Horror films don't create fear. They release it."
~Wes Craven

Prophecy (1979)

Prophecy
Year released: 1979

Directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Black Sunday and, well, lets just forget about that remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau shall we?)

Starring: Mrs. Rocky, Some white-afro'd mod supercool mustachioed 70s dude with groovy pants suits, that guy who would later go on to play that other guy in John Carpenter's The Thing and gets his arms ripped off by an alien chest cavity, Armand Assante and his ramrod straight spinal cord, a grizzly bear turned inside out and lots of pine trees.

The 1970s were one long teaser trailer for me. I was born in 1970. That first decade of my life was incredibly formative. I learned, in the space of ten short years, that my father was a scumbag, my sister was mental and horror movies - much like growing breasts and kissing boys and staying up late on school nights - were just beyond my reach. It was a lot like the tiny little sips of beer that my Dad allowed me to take from a Dixie cup at dinnertime: not enough to get me drunk, but enough to let me know that this would be something to which I would return in time, immerse myself in and master. Great goals, huh? Thanks dad, I was determined to be a drunk by the age of 8. But I was more determined to be a horror movie expert long before my first sip of Budweiser.

By now I'm sure I've told you all the story of my first horror experience at the age of three when I saw a TV trailer for The Exorcist, about as many time as your mom has told you all about the days she used to walk to the bus stop, up hill, both ways, barefoot, in ten feet of snow.

The year after that, I saw the trailer for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and put it on my mental To-Watch list. Then came Carrie and The Omen. The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween. 1979's television trailers were the equivalent of a decadent dessert tray rolling slowly past me: Alien, Phantasm, The Brood, The Amityville Horror and, last but not least, Prophecy. I had no idea what the word Prophecy even meant. All I knew was that something BIG was crashing its way through the treetops, a thing so big that no flashlight beam could pin it down. I had to know what the Prophecy was. What did it look like? Did it have big ripping teeth and claws the size of Ginsu knives? Did it eat people?

Anyway, the 80s finally arrived and it was a pretty shit decade all things considered: Reaganomics, lots of cocaine, shit pop music and fluorescent green leg warmers. Bleagh. But finally I was old enough to start watching horror movies and I quickly ran down the list I'd made in my head. Except for one. I never did get around to watching Prophecy. Not sure why. It must have been available to rent at some point, but it just never happened. No matter. It is now the 21st century and ultimately, thank god for YouTube.

Okay, so finally, after 35 years of waiting, here we go.

Never go bobbing for french fries.

Hmm, pretty straightforward so far. White Man has ruined the earth and poisoned the water in the name of profit. Native Americans do not approve and are, of course, the scapegoats who are blamed whenever the White Men need someone to blame for their own fuck ups. Mr. 70s EPA agent sympathizes with the Native community and sets out to do whatever he can to prove that the local paper mill has contaminated the water supply with lethal amounts of mercury, which has also been causing the wildlife to mutate into icky, gooey, twisted former versions of themselves, i.e. giant blobby tadpoles, bigass duck-eating salmon and a couple of baby bears caught in a fish net who look like the horrible aborted offspring of a wax dummy and a cheese pizza. Their pathetic little grunty cries and hoarse baby tantrum shrieks are excruciating to listen to and throw newly pregnant Talia Shire into a panic. After all, she's been eating the local fare - what the hell will her baby come out looking like? The Lovecraft fan in me wonders if this agonizing scene was inspired by the freakish, waterlogged corpses of indescribable monsters washed up on the riverbanks of Vermont following a Biblical flood.

And suddenly, out of nowhere in a thus far dead serious eco-horror tale comes this:

HahahahahahahHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! What the fuck was that? Did footage from a Friday the 13th flick sneak its way into the editing room? This is fucking hilarious! The moral of this campfire story seems to be: never try to bunny hop your way out of danger. Also, never pack your sleeping bag with nitroglycerine, because a single, half-hearted swipe from a pissed off, irradiated bear will cause you to explode, leaving nothing behind but a shower of goose feathers.

So Dr. WhiteGod, a nauseated looking Talia, Armand Apseudo-Indian and a handful of disposable bear bait go fucking off into the wilderness with their squishy bear babies, hoping to get them to a news outlet and expose the Horrible Truth, but Momma BurnedBearRoast is following them every step of the way, kinda like that scene in Jurassic Park 2 where the T-Rexes come after Vince Vaughn in a desperate attempt to prevent him from doing True Detective Season 2. She even crosses a lake at one point in dogged (bearred?) pursuit, and the remaining cast helpfully stand stock still, waiting for her to catch up so they can scream their stupid heads off and have the nerve to look surprised. Quick! Lets us take shelter in a nearby cabin and wait for the bear to smash  its way in. And, oh hey look! We have WEAPONS! We could have been using these the whole time! I wonder why we waited so long? Let's use them now and kill the thing in a frenzy of outraged anger, thereby invalidating all of the prep work done so far to prove to the audience that not all White Men are bad and can learn how to live with nature and take responsibility for their mistakes. Nah, screw that - KILL THAT FUCKING BEAR!!! Grunt a lot while you do so and make it manly! Both fists, come on you pansy! Assert your alpha masculinity! Oh, and make sure you use Armand's arrow as your final weapon so as to insinuate that you have somehow been accepted as one of them and are the incarnation of the White Mustachioed Savior come to bring them into the 21st century via The Bible and Home Shopping Network.

So yeah - definitely not worth the 35 year wait.
Except for that fucking sleeping bag scene.
Still giggling.

"Hey! I'm walkin' here!"

Byzantium (2012)

"My mother did three things for me. One, she spared my life the day that I was born. Two, she paid for my upkeep on her knees and on her back. And three, she gave me the story I can never tell."

~Eleanor Webb, Byzantium