Some people spend their Friday nights out in public, dancing in packed clubs to loud, bone-splintering music with total strangers, vacuuming up alcoholic beverages the way black holes suck up entire galaxies. I spent my last Friday night watching horror movies in my underwear with a friend, surrounded by a graveyard of chicken wing bones, cheesy bread remnants and sticky half-glasses of rum and coke. And, of course, as good friends do when they are totally at ease with one another, existing on that special plane of deep-seated geekism, we had to start playing the "Have You Seen?" game. As in, "Ohmygod, this movie/scene/actor/whatever totally reminds me of this whole other movie! Have you seen it? Ohmygod you HAVE to see it!" And then the other person rattles off a movie, which in turn reminds you of yet
another movie, and pretty soon you've got sixteen movies on your list and you've missed 37 minutes of crucial dialogue in the film you're supposed to be watching, so you back it up and start over and then wonder why the fuck you're so tired the next morning.
Anyway, round about midnight, my friend decided to pick a movie I'd never seen and had barely heard of called
Frankenstein's Army, a WW2 era found footage film. I was beyond dubious. In fact, I was over the fucking reluctance fence and well on my way to
I Contemptuously Sneer At Your Premise land.
I was wrong. Okay? Wrongface Wrongy McWrongfuck, the wrongest wrong bitch ever to wrong her way through Wrongville. Happy now?
Frankenstein's Army (2013)
In retrospect, I really wish this hadn't been the last movie we watched before we went to sleep. Because it freaked me out. I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares, the distorted, half-awake, hallucinatory kind that comes with a late night and too much Kraken.
A straggly group of Russian soldiers led by one Polish guy are working their way deeper into Germany in search of...uh, some other guys, I think. I don't know man, I was half asleep, bear with me here. Anyway, they stumble upon some seriously deformed skeletons, a zombie half-corpse and a mountain of murdered nuns. Oh, and they have a documentarian with them, who is filming everything at all times. There's also a real jerk who looks like a bargain bin Cillian Murphy playing the role of Volatile Guy Who Wants to Be in Charge, so we just know he's gonna eat it in the most gruesome way possible before the film ends.
Working their way into an old castle, they stumble upon an underground labyrinthine complex where Dr. Viktor Frankenstein - a descendant of the
other, more famous Viktor Frankenstein - is making an army for the Nazi's out of mutilated corpses and machine parts. It's a whipstitch zombie robot holocaust nightmare down there, where every turn of every corner reveals yet another fucked up creation. There's a guy with a propeller where his face should be, cuisinarting people to death. There's a giant hammerheaded robot sentry, a guy with a bear trap face that opens and closes like bigass steel piranha teeth, a half corpse crawling around on the floor with what looks like a mine attached to his neck stump, and - my absolute favorite - a guy walking around on stilts on all fours with a power drill mouth, ambling up behind people and unicorning them to death with much dental squealy noise, geysering blood and bone smoke.
Several soldiers die. Some other people show up out of nowhere for the sole purpose of being slaughtered. Finally the guys make their way down into the very bowels of the laboratory, where Dr. Frankenstein Himself is frantically working, splicing brains and jump-starting corpses with crude electrical gadgets. He's got a slave dancer alien girl from Jabba's palace as his nursing assistant, and a cute, stubby little robot that looks like a cross between R2D2 and an egg timer waddling along after him. Everyone dies and it's all captured on film. Lucky us.
I was a bit fuzzy on the plot, but I attribute that to being slightly drunk and really sleepy. A couple of the monsters were very obviously guys in rubber suits. But you know what? I'd rather see a guy in a rubber suit than see really cheap, flat, ridiculously cartoonish CGI. Yeah, so the giant crustaceous guy looked like a mascot loaner from Red Lobster - so what? What the fuck is a patchwork corpse really going to look like anyway?
This movie is sick. Deeply, pervertedly sick, wallowing in sadism, upsettingly snuff-film-esque nasty, filled with horrible screams of agony and torture so precise it's almost art. It's subterranean sets and hellish boiler room backdrops reminded me of...
Necromentia (2009)
You have to draw the line somewhere. At some point, you just have to say: “Okay, that’s it. No more movies featuring obese guys cavorting around in pig masks and bearing questionable stains on their clothes.” I mean, I was fine with Motel Hell, but Jin Won Kim’s “The Butcher” was the last straw. I gave up pig mask movies and bacon immediately. Lasted about two days without the bacon.
But I said that before I happened upon a screen cap featuring – what else? – a morbidly obese man in a pig mask and a loincloth, dancing around a Pee Wee’s Playhouse inspired set and gleefully singing a song about suicide, complete with “follow the bouncing ball” graphics. Seriously, how could you not be curious?
Deep in the dank, festering underbelly of Some Inner City, USA, a man named Hagen toils in a basement room, tending to the corpse of his dead girlfriend, Elizabeth. He’s doing all he can to slow the process of decay, convinced that she will eventually return from where she’s gone, but there’s a limit to his skills and both time and putrefaction are winning the war. Just as Hagen is about to give up in despair, in walk two men who, from their outward appearances, are either members of an outlaw motorcycle gang or severely sleep deprived tattoo artists.
In fact, they’re neither. They’re just two guys who happen to know exactly what Hagen’s been doing and why. Travis, the frontman, also knows that he’s doing it wrong and convinces Hagen that he knows how to bring Elizabeth back. Unfortunately, it’s painful. Also unfortunately, it lands Hagen in one of Hell’s pipe lined boiler rooms, where a gas mask wearing demon and a huge reptilian monster are eagerly awaiting his arrival.
Beginning at the end of its story and reversing gears, Necromentia tells us the tales of Travis, former junkie and S&M dungeon master who would do anything to bring back his dead kid brother, a wheelchair bound autistic lured into suicide by demons. It is also the story of Morbius, a demon who was once a man and who sees in Travis an opportunity to get revenge on the people who betrayed and murdered him…his girlfriend, Elizabeth, and her lover, Hagen.
Marred only by some pretentious, long-winded dialogue and an excess of obvious padding, Necromentia is still highly watchable, a welcome change from the steady glut of unimaginative hack n’ slash I usually subside on. It’s a deeply sick look at the kind of irreversibly fucked up people whose seedy lives and heinous crimes are usually reserved for shows like 48 Hours on ID. The demons in the boiler room are merely the parsley on the steak plate. These people seem real, as only a fan of forensics shows such as myself could attest. They are their own Hells, and the radius of their despair and inhumanity spreads slowly outwards like a cancer, swallowing everything good and positive that comes into contact with them.
It’s a great help too that the cast – consisting of no one I’ve ever heard of before – can act, and do so to the best of their abilities. The special effects are more than decent, considering the budget, which I can only assume was meager. There’s no CGI here. There’s rubber monster suits, buckets of bloody entrails and that goddamned Pig Man, shimmying about with as much jiggle as possible, nasogastric tubes shoved up his snout and enthusiastically singing about being sodomized by the Easter Bunny. I kid you not, boys and girls. I wasn’t sure whether to giggle or dry heave.
A trip through Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with Ed Gein would be as close as you could come to duplicating the experience of watching this film. Throw in a good case of stomach flu and a handful of angel dust while you’re at it. Now it’s up to you to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Again, set primarily in a windowless basement Hell populated by weird, gas mask wearing beings who are half human, half junkyard, I couldn't help but be reminded of...
Banshee Chapter (2013)
Never mess with super secret government projects. Especially if they feature the guy who was in
The Silence Of The Lambs. He never threatens anyone with lotion or hoses, but he does have a tendency to fuck with people's heads, telling them he's dropped a powerful hallucinogen into their cocktails and basically being a reclusive, Hunter S. Thompson jackass. Into his world wanders Anne, who is looking for her missing boyfriend James. James was an investigative reporter and was working on a book about MKUltra, the CIA's dirty little chapter which specialized in
"the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior." Which means they force fed unknowing and unwilling people powerful, mind altering narcotics and then programmed them to do various things that were totally against their nature.
This isn't anything new. Both
The Manchurian Candidate and
Firestarter touched on the highly toxic and controversial subject of MKUltra, which is no longer a secret but remains very much a verboten topic. But
Banshee Chapter suggests that the MKUltra experiments not only altered people's mind but opened new doorways within them, allowing interdimensional entities to wander through into our realm. Both Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" and H.P. Lovecraft's "From Beyond" are mentioned, and if you've read either of those stories, you'll understand immediately where this story is going.
Anne and Buffalo Bill - sorry, Levine actually plays a character named Thomas Blackburn - team up after Blackburn's girlfriend ends up a blood-vomiting black eyed zombie. Driving out into the desert in search of a mysterious numbers station (and there are few things in the world creepier than a fucking Numbers Station - go google that shit if you have no idea what I'm talking about) they discover an abandoned fallout shelter. Breaking into it seems like a really bad idea, so that's exactly what Anne does. Unfortunately, she learns too late that the drug her boyfriend took was of alien extraction, and turns all those who ingest it into portals for alien intelligences. The aliens move into your skin and pilot your body like a fucked up dune buggy taken for a joyride. This shit is messed up. But Anne has already stuck her foot in the doorway and there's no turning back.
I mostly clicked on this Netflix streamer because the cover art looked cool. I'm so glad I did. It's truly creepy, way more intelligent than any horror film strives to be these days and - best of all - based on a very ugly historical truth. Frankly, I don't think there's been
enough movies made about MKUltra. The subjected is avoided like the proverbial plague, perhaps out of a lingering fear that the curious will disappear and their existences erased by black-garbed government agents. But yet the particulars of the project are absolutely fucking horrifying, the psychological version of Unit 731. And if you don't know what Unit 731 was either, you utterly fail as a horror fan.
Incidentally, Unit 731 is a WW2 human experimentation project, which leads me right back to
Frankenstein's Army. Full circle, you're welcome.
4 – Night of the Demon (1957). “Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes.” Yeah, this is the film that Richard O’Brien spoke of in the opening credits of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Based on M.R. James’ short story “Casting the Runes” and set in the soggy, sodden, rotting countryside of a dark, morose England, Night of the Demon is the story of a pleasant Satanist, a skeptical American, a pretty girl and a bigass monster with horns and teeth the size of the Chrysler building. It’s a genuinely disturbing film even if the monster may seem a tad goofy by today’s standards, and contains a simple but very effective jumpscare about halfway through, at (fittingly) a Halloween party.
5 – The Innocents (1960). Hmmm. English flick starring Deborah Kerr, set in 1800s. Sounds stuffy and boring, right? Wrong. The Innocents is one of the sickest and most perverted films I have ever seen, and yet contains not a single drop of blood nor an ounce of sex. It is all about suggestion, of things hinted at, hidden away and left to fester until the right catalyst – in this case, Kerr – comes along and pokes at them until they burst. It’s a ghost story first and foremost, but dig a little deeper and it’s diseased through and through, like a pretty pink frosted birthday cake filled with cockroaches. Sexual abuse, pedophilia and demonic possession lurk just below the immaculate, starched white surface of this film and, despite the title, no one here is innocent.
6 – Black Christmas (1974). It’s always such a downer when Halloween ends, and out come the Christmas decorations. Autumn is over and now it’s just a dull, cold trudge through the long months of shiny commercialism. But what if a little bit of Halloween, stashed away up in the attic, wasn’t quite ready to be put away yet? Black Christmas, released 3 years before Halloween and atrociously remade in the early 2000’s, was a slasher film from the mind of the King Of Christmas, the late great Bob Clark, whose celluloid homage to the Red Ryder BB gun A Christmas Story became a staple of December movie marathons. Where the love story of Ralphie and his gun was nostalgic and cute, Black Christmas is bloody, vicious and deeply sick in its subject matter. This film makes the returns line at Target on December 26th, seem joyous by comparison.
7 – The Changeling (1980). Once upon a time, ghost stories were actually scary, and movies about ghosts were taken seriously, starred big name actors and featured smart scripts. In this mostly forgotten gem, George C. Scott plays a grieving widower, who moves into a huge mansion outside of Seattle and starts hearing spooky noises. There’s a hidden attic room, a body in a well, a covered up murder and a really spooky seance scene, all of which culminate in the mother of all temper tantrums as the ghost of a young boy lashes out in unchecked fury at the living, including those who would try to help him. Scary, scary shit!
10.1 – The Pact (2012). And here we are in the second decade of a whole new century, still in our infancy really. And while I know a lot of people will be sitting down to watch Cabin In The Woods at this year’s Halloween party (a perfectly good choice, by the way), may I suggest that you pop in The Pact once the party settles down and the Trick Or Treaters have gone home to bed and it’s just you and a couple of other true fans of horror sitting up with a slight beer buzz and a lapful of fun sized candy wrappers? This one has been getting some buzz, but not nearly as much as it deserves. It’s a truly gothic ghost story, for all that it’s shot in suburbia and incorporates Google maps as a plot device. This is the film that Paranormal Activity 4 wishes it could have been. It’s rare that I watch a movie more than once these days, but I’ve had this one on repeat for several weeks now, and I’ve yet to tire of it. Easily the best and most underrated film of the decade (thus far).
