Dario Argento’s Inferno

As a fan of spaghetti terror since high school, I have delved into the films of Argento, Fulci, and Bava liberally. I consider Suspiria to be one of my favorite films, and I have somehow not completed the Three Mothers trilogy that it is a part of.

Inferno is the second in a chapter. In typical technicolor fever dream fashion, we’re introduced to the book of the Three Witches as it is found by our innocent heroin. A dreamlike narration introduces us to Mater Suspirium(the mother of sighs), Mater Tenaebreum(the mother of tears) and Mater Lachrymarum(the 3rd mother? I dunno.) Anyways, the plot is just a nightmare that you can’t wake up from and I say that as a good thing. One scene shows the protagonist(one of many) step down a narrow stairway into a highly stylized, spooky basement area. She finds a hole in the middle of it all that is filled with water beneath it. She drops her locket and has to retrieve it, along with a key that will help her further unleash more nightmares upon the world. The sequence is show underwater, giving a hazy feeling of struggle as right there, a corpse floats up to her in a classic jump scare.

There is literally no towns person that anyone can trust in this film. Not even the town hot dog vendor is normal, for in one scene he goes to a man being attacked by hundreds of rats and plunges a knife into his neck. Now, the poor guy was no saint. The towns’ spooky antique/occult shopkeeper has rounded up a bag of cats to drown in the pond, apparently just for funsies. I mean, the guy deserved it. I just know that if I were to get a hot dog in New York, I don’t think I would choose that one. The hot dogs he’s serving definitely aren’t kosher, know what I mean?

It’s thin on plot but that’s not a bad thing with Argento. How many of YOUR nightmares are completely coherent? The architecture of all of the buildings has been designed by the crippled old man who wrote the book, and the witches use these buildings as their eyes and ears. Yes,that’s right. The Mother of Sighs watches you as you sleep.

The movie is a showcase for setpieces. In one scene, a man is in a college lecture and suddenly a shady seductress is making piercing eye contact with him as she pets a fat grey cat. Nobody else notices her. She’s definitely in league with the witches. In yet another scene, a man is attacked by about 10 angry cats in a dark room. In another, a woman accidentally sets some curtains on fire and she pulls them down on top of her, leading her to fall out of a window and plunge to a fiery death.

The score of the film punctuates that feeling of dread all the way through, like when you eat too many DXM capsules on an empty stomach and the world is spinning. All the Italian trademarks are here: bizarre architecture, spooky occult stuff, black gloved killers. It all leads to a brilliant finale where a groovy dude gets to the root of the conspiracy and meets Mater Tenabrarum in the burning building and she explains with maniacal glee that the Three Mothers are literal personifications of death, and in a flash she morphs into a hooded skeleton cackling as the walls burn around her. All in all, this was a brilliant film. Just stay away from LSD while watching it and you should be able to prevent any panic attacks.

The Taking of Deborah Logan

As a horror fan, it’s rare to see something truly disturbing. I saw this one at Hastings and have heard no press about it, I love randomly checking out a film that could be shit or could be gold. The Taking of Deborah Logan starts out as a documentary film mixed with surveillance footage with some scary set pieces. The concept is that a med student is doing a project for her film class and chooses to document a week in the life of an Alzheimer’s patient. The daughter has agreed because she and her mother Deborah really need the cash. I guess a college student is capable of paying the big bucks? All jokes aside, it opens interestingly enough with Deborah feeling like a sideshow attraction and has cold feet. She backs out of the documentary because she doesn’t want to be exploited.
Our main girl talks her back into it, and we are brought into the life of an Alzheimer sufferer. Or is it truly Alzheimer’s? They learn that Deborah is into gardening, and that she does crossword puzzles to keep her mind sharp, and she has her moments of forgetfulness. It seems like a warmhearted affair until she starts to act truly bizarre. Not just forgetting things, but going into thousand-yard stare trances at the wall in the middle of the night.
As the film is intercut with surveillance footage, we are given creepy shots of empty hallways. Shot by shot by shot. Then Deborah appears, looking frail and wearing a nightgown that drapes over her bony frame. At one point, she is observed standing in front of the sink at 2:30 AM and suddenly appearing on the countertop with her head under the stove cover. There is no time lapse. At this point they hear her moaning and growling, facing a wall. When she turns around, her throat spills open with hot fresh blood spilling down the front of her gown.
At this point she is taken to the hospital. The daughter learns that the Alzheimer’s is in a rapidly advancing stage, but they had originally anticipated at least five more years of normalcy. They treat her wounds and send her back home. This is where that whole “Is it Alzheimer’s?” thing comes into play. She’s back at home and the crew hears a commotion upstairs. The daughter goes to check on Deborah. The cameraman waits. He is filming the kitchen, and sees Deborah passing by the door. She is staring at an open window at 3 in the morning now and mumbling. She grabs a hammer and begins to nail the window shut. It’s common behavior for her, according to the daughter. At another point, Deborah rushes to the garden and frantically digs until her fingers turn bloody and raw. As her hands are washed by the leader of the film project, Deborah just blankly looks at her, murmuring in an ancient tongue. The camera guys soon find that she is speaking in an actual language and they translate it.
A side story mentions that the town had a serial killer who brought 4 girls to a cabin and had something to do with earthworms or something. The movie slightly falls apart here. In one scene, Deborah is found collapsed with a trail of black vomit and earthworms that she threw up.
One night the crew is woken by Deborah’s neighbor blasting out their windows and headlights with a shotgun. He blasts and blasts. Through the project, he’s been trying to talk the daughter out of letting the film crew there. He’s drunk and angry. The crew is shaken, and the next morning our titular heroine is back in the hospital, where things get weird. Deb might be possessed by the serial killer from many years hence.
It’s a movie that feeds on some dark, primal fears. Things that all of us worry about. Healthcare for elderly relatives, the mind slowly rotting away until even the woman who conceived you sees you as a strange imposter. The acting is actually really terrific, but that’s just my opinion. I may have a blind spot or something. But it’s a notch above typical horror acting. In the hospital, where she is now admitted for the rest of the movie, she is seen on their surveillance cameras wandering the hallways with a little girl from the cancer ward. She takes her to the hospital’s morgue and then the full-on terror is cranked to 11. Deb begins shrieking and unhinges her jaw, and begins to devour the little girls head. After she is shot by her daughter, she flips out and takes out two cops. She’s a feral monster at this point. She escapes to the woods, and they gather the snakes that flock to her into a burlap sack and set them ablaze. This ends the curse… well, kind of. In the epilogue, the young girl has recovered and Deb is ruled not mentally competent to stand trial. In a news report, they interview the little girl. Her cancer is now in remission. In one look, it’s implied that the serial killer’s spirit may now be in her.
This is a movie that may elicit chuckles if watched with friends. However, I recommend watching it alone or with your bae late at night with all the lights out. For a movie that is a relative of the much-hated Found Footage genre, this one really only loses its footing slightly in the last 10 minutes.

My beef with Pinhead.

I consider the first Hellraiser to be a masterpiece of atmospheric terror. I still watch it and feel a sense of dread and foreboding as the Cenobites with their Chattering teeth and throat pussies slither behind the scenes, not saying much. This movie was pure. Written by Clive Barker and Directed by Clive Barker. I really love Clive Barker. He likes to go to dark places. He has cemented a place in history with this film.
I don’t know what the hell happened to you, Pinhead. I rented some later Hellraisers, including Hellraiser:Hellworld. It is hard to describe the shittiness of Hellraiser sequels. An MMORPG based on Hellraiser mythology is popular among the dorky gamer goth kids, and they all get invited to an exclusive party at a secluded house. They all get shown around by Lance Henrickson, who for some reason becomes Pinhead and then changes back to Lance at random times. I don’t even know. So stupid. All of the kids in this dumb thing get the Cenobite treatment and the ideas are ramshackle bargain basement Cenobites. After they stage an escape, they learn that it was all a Virtual Reality simulation. A big fuck you who decided to fuck with the Hellraiser mythology and all of its former glory.

House

As a young heathen growing up with Grandparents who loved Hitchcock murder mysteries, it didn’t take me too long to stumble upon things that would horrify me on TNT. I got my first taste of Return of the Living Dead when I was about 7 years old. One lesser known flick was house. I would always catch small snippets of the movie, but I saw enough creature effects to give me some restless nights. In these final months leading to Halloween, I decided that it was time to rent house again.
It’s the story of a successful author who writes scary stuff and has a fan base, but his latest book is about his experiences in the Vietnam war. There is a lack of interest in this subject matter. He inherits a house from his aunt where she committed suicide not too long ago. It’s largely a horror comedy, and it’s a good mixture, almost on par with Evil Dead 2. George Wendt as his nosy neighbor adds a level-headedness to the spooky proceedings. Poor guys house is overrun with ancient evils, portals opening up, etc. When he finally finds out the source of all this weirdness, it is a Tales from the Crypt nightmare.
You see, it has Nam flashbacks with Bull from Night Court. In one scene, our hero has the chance to put Bull out of his misery, but can’t bring himself to slit his throat. Seconds later, the Viet Cong capture Bull as he bellows “I’ll never forgive you for this!” At one point, our hero goes through a bathroom window into an alternate world that looks suspiciously like Vietnam. He finds his missing son in a cage and is trying to get him out. The child escapes, but soon enough, here comes Bull. He is skeletal, rotting, and pissed off. He chases him through the house, and it’s eventually revealed that the dude can’t even hurt the living. So Mr. 80’s perm lodges a live grenade in the ghoul’s chest, and they live happily ever after. (Until House 2, that is)

P.S. This is not the Japanese House. You can tell that one because the announcer likes to call it HOOOOUUUSSSSEEEEE

Exorcist 2: The Heretic ( A cinematic shart)

After selecting a few lesser known classics like Exorcist 3(the excellent Exorcist sequel with Brad Douriff aka Chucky from Child’s Play) and House, I decided that I would watch the cinematic abortion that is Exorcist 2. Reagan has moved on with her life and lives in relative simplicity dancing her days away in high school. She has no memories of that one time when Pazuzu was all up in her gutty wuts making her do stuff like spider walk, piss everywhere, and vomit green shit everywhere. OR DOES SHE REMEMBER AND PAZUZU IS CONTROLLING HER AND SHE’S JUST HIDING IT EXCEPTIONALLY WELL?
That’s pretty much the premise. The big wigs at the Vatican decide to send a priest who’s actually a really big fuckup. It’s unbelievable how much of a fuckup he is. The film opens with him botching an exorcism and letting a girl catch on fire while doing absolutely nothing to put her out. No “Stop, drop, and roll!” or anything. So yeah, he’s like the Barney Fife of exorcists. Eventually the stupidest device in cinema history is introduced. It’s supposed to access the subconscious of Reagan so we can see if Mr. Zuzu is still up in her. It has straps that attach to your head, enough to “psychically” link two people. How do they do that? Easy. You stare into an intensely bright light for about 5 minutes at a time, and I guess that puts you into a trance. They don’t mention the part about going FUCKING blind. It really is ridiculous, and according to the man himself William Friedkin (He had no part in this shitpile.) the entire theatre burst into laughter when the apparatus was revealed. Like, helpless, hysterical laughter. Like, are you fuckin kidding me?
The movie isn’t entirely without it’s cool parts. The part where Pazuzu is exerting his spiritual influence and all those locust shots and weird chanting is going on is kinda cool. Personally I think they could cut out 20 minutes of the endlessly repeating locust swarms. Another part is when that fuckup priest “Takes wing with Pazuzu”. It’s oddly romantic. Like Aladdin except for with Sumerian gods of the air and crop destruction. Oh yeah, the priest eventually gets seduced by the Evil Reagan into fucking her. She’s like 15 or 16 at most. Really morally questionable. I highly recommend this movie. It’s the cream of the CRAP. I mean that in the best possible way.

I finally experienced Twin Peaks in its entirety.(Yes, even when Laura Palmer’s killer was revealed and it got a bit silly.)

     Why, hey all. I’ve been neglecting this dusty corner of the interwebs, I really hope some of my followers aren’t too angry that I haven’t posted any awesomely insightful thoughts on the state of horror lately. Last week found me picking up the newest Rue Morgue magazine which featured a Twin Peaks retrospective. Let’s see… Eraserhead, Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire. I’ve seen all of those, but somehow have completely neglected the saga of Twin Peaks. This is a show that’s been at the edges of my consciousness, but never fully explored. I knew there was a red room of dreams. I knew there was a dancing dwarf and a giant in this room that talked backwards. This was all second hand information to me. As I began the marathon, I was immediately hooked. The series pilot was directed as a movie, with a nice thorough explanation of everybody in town. A teenage beauty queen is found rapped in plastic, cuts all over her body, left in the woods to rot. Sheriff Harry S Truman finds her and soon a full scale investigation is launched that finds FBI agent Dale Cooper arriving in town. Ever the optimist, Cooper as played by Kyle Maclachlan is at moments awkward and hilarious.

      Scenes with vaguely dreamlike qualities start to sneak into the nice, 50’s-esque town of Twin Peaks with the coroner finding letters deeply embedded in Laura’s fingers. It’s kinda painful to watch those tweezers sink into the flesh. To get into the quirky characters would be quite a long blog post, but I will highlight a few things. Lynch has a way of channeling a weird kind of energy to his shots, and as we delve deeper into the Laura Palmer mystery, we find she was involved in the sex trade and tons of cocaine. And also, delivering Meals on Wheels to the elderly and the shut ins. The series moves ever more swiftly into truly strange territory, as the character’s lives all intersect in strange and scandalous ways. Personally, I wish that the Log Lady was real so that i could consult her as an Oracle.

     At the conclusion of Season 1, it’s revealed that there is an evil entity named Bob who lives in the woods. As wind blows through Sycamore trees, things begin to get strange. Cooper begins to get prophetic visions, telling him cryptic hints to the Laura Palmer puzzle. In a truly horrifying scene, it turns out that Laura’s father Leland Palmer is the culprit. He was possessed by Bob the whole time, being used as a conduit for pure evil. Leland becomes possessed again and brutally beats Laura’s cousin, who looks exactly like her, only with black hair. It’s a shocking act of violence. The last shot of the season is Bob causing the sprinklers to go off in the jail where Leland is being held, and the water looks like a scene in the rain as Leland slowly dies, his eyes filled with tears, remembering Laura and dying with a black mark on his soul. It’s incredibly emotional. No other director could conjure up a vision like that.

     Season 2 is widely criticized as being dumb. I don’t really like to blaspheme against Lynch like that, but I can see where people are coming from. After the Palmer murder is solved, a character named Windom Earle enters the scene. Cooper’s former FBI partner, Earle is batshit crazy and obsessed with a place called the Black Lodge. Years ago, Cooper was in love with Earle’s wife Caroline. According to the story, Caroline died in Cooper’s arms. The emotional scars of that never quite go away. Earle is a little bit of a wacky guy, and he basically makes this guy named Leo into his personal Frankenstein’s Monster using electroshock and other forms of psychological manipulation. He wire taps Sheriff Truman’s office using a bonzai tree and in a hilarious cameo, David Lynch appears as a deaf FBI agent and screams into the Bonzai tree, and Earle takes off the headphones quickly from the loudness of Lynch’s voice. Earle’s the kind of guy who revels in his own diabolical nature, and loves to dress up in different costumes to stalk the girls of Twin Peaks.

     The series ends abruptly. Agent Cooper makes his way into the Black Lodge. He encounters pure nightmare fuel in this place. I’ll leave it at that. It truly chilled me to the bone. If you’re a Lynch fan who never dedicated your time to this series, I highly recommend it. Although, to be fair, it is a frustratingly incomplete work of art. The series ends on a cliffhanger, and it never got a third season. CBS or whatever ultimately lost interest. But what a beautifully flawed piece of art it is.

You’re Next

I just got finished watching You’re Next which I was expecting to be a typical horror home invasion movie but I was a little off base. The movie starts out with this sausage nippled dude totally railing this chick who’s way too hot for him and then he finishes and takes a shower and this chick walks around all naked drinking juice and she sees somethin crazy outside and then he gets out of the shower and boom! “You’re next” scribbled in insanely detailed handwriting given the short time between the girls death and the guy getting out of the shower.
Same neighborhood, this time the Ma and Pa of a big family are getting ready for a big family reunion and they get to the house and it’s unlocked. Mama has a bad feeling about all this and has the husband investigate upstairs. Right as he is about to find out who’s in the closet, his son comes up the stairs and tells him mama’s crying downstairs so they all go to investigate.
Then everyone starts arriving and sibling rivalry and dickery are happening all over the place. They’re sitting down to dinner and edgy documentary filmmaker guy sees something at the window and boom! Glass-shattering projectile shatters window, instant crossbow through his blood ripe melon. It doesn’t take long for that panic to kick in and soon every person for themselves. A girl bravely attempts to run outside to maybe catch the mysterious killers offguard but nope! Clothesline wire splits her neck open quite graphically. One brother goes through the movie with an arrow straight through his chest and somehow goes on living.
In the end , a plot twist is revealed and the hot softspoken British chick tells the story of how she was raised on a survivalist compound and then we slowly and surely realize that some sort of demented family plot is afoot and blood, blood, blood, spray, blood, stab, badass shit going on all over the place. I have to give this movie 4 fuck yeahs.

Gore Breakdown
Table Flipping in Frustration-1 Instance
Arrow through cranium-1 instance
Arrow jutting through sarcastic brothers vital organs but still managing to survive: 1 instance, 30 minutes screen time before he succumbs.
Identity fuckery: Multiple instances.
Bloodbath and people stepping on goddawful painful boards protruding with nails: 2 or 3 times. ouch!

On the sad addiction of BrBa

I received the Breaking Bad Barrel Blu Ray box set and I have been watching it like a crack fiend. Watching it, I feel like delving into the world of crime fiction. This journal/blog had been something to get me into the habit of writing nightly, getting into a good habit. Now I feel that I want to write really good crime and I’m attempting to understand its inner workings. I’d really like to write a Shadow story. Bring back Lamont. “Who knows… what evil… LURKS… in the hearts of men? That Shadow Knows…” Pulp still has a viable market. People need a consistent plot to escape from the mundane world. Something in serial form.
Now as I watch Breaking Bad for the second run through, I find myself analyzing the stuff that makes the plot compelling. What makes it flow so well? What kept people watching? Maybe its a dark mirror of America, a completely believable middle-age chemistry teacher whose complacency in life has finally caught up with him. A cancer diagnosis, a new lease on life, the heartbreak of family and friends as he transforms slowly and surely into a sort of monster. Maybe Walt represents at the very beginning of the show the beaten-down typical American male who is locked into a passionless marriage and his transformation reflects a dark underbelly that could make monsters of any one of us under the surface.
It is a show of secrets, and it makes you wonder what desperate things people would do in a crumbling economy just to keep their families safe and protected. Poisoning a child and watching a heroine addict choke to death on her own vomit while doing nothing represents levels of depravity that only the sickest of individuals would consider. But that’s the thing, when you watch the news, it’s always “He was just the nicest guy you could meet. So strange he carved up the family dog and served it at the barbeque to friends and neighbors.” Walt has many odds in his favor: his ‘normal’ chemistry teacher job, his respectable marriage, his timid demeanor, his family man persona. All of this makes it difficult for Skylar to just be done with him.
Maybe Walt White is the nation’s shadow form, brought to frighteningly intense life by Bryan Cranston. I think the show balances well because of the several factors in play.Family Guy Walter loves baby Holly and wants to protect her and keep the relationship with Skylar intact. Then there’s bitter Walt who harbors deep resentment in his black soul to the fact that Grey Matter is so successful and long ago abandoned him and became intolerable new age granola crunching yuppies with massive liberal guilt complex. There’s also father White, who cares for Jesse in a very paternal, tough love way.
Walt White is a complicated character. He is Hank Schrader’s great White Whale. His Moby Dick. And Mr. White can definitely be a dick. During season 3, Hank just fucking loses it. He becomes obsessed with Heisenberg. He just won’t let the case drop, even though many at the DEA want him to. It is all of these separate elements that combine to make on fuck of a pot boiler of a show.

Video review of The Fall!

Joe Hill’s latest, Horns.

Sometimes a horror writer comes along that comes with such high acclaim, that I’m initially skeptical. I’d heard about Joe Hill off and on, magazine articles here and there. After learning that he was Stephen King’s son, I thought that this could be a case where the son would not do justice to the dad’s writing. With Heart-Shaped Box and 20th Century Ghosts, I was proven awesomely wrong. With Horns, he continues a flaming hot streak of awesome writing.
An exploration of the darkest aspect of human nature, Horns explores a dark world where every single skeleton in the closet is brought back to horrifyingly vivid life. The story is of Ignatius Perrish, a 26 year old man who lives a life like a lot of us lead. That’s what I like about Joe Hill. Somehow he seems to be in touch with all the imperfections of human nature. Nothing’s idealized except for those poetic moments that are painted with expert skill. Ignatius has just woken with horns on his head after a night of blasphemy and doing awful things. Like peeing on a statue of the virgin mother. As he goes into town he finds that his current girlfriend and everybody in town are willing to share their deepest darkest secrets. Impulses that we feel in flashes of weakness that we never act on. Confessions of sins, confessions of how it feels good to sin. He finds that as they confess, his horns throb with an almost sexual pleasure, filling with blood as more and more is revealed.
As Ig learns more and more about his condition, we are introduced to another lovable girl of Joe Hill’s creation, and the most vile loathsome antagonist that I’ve encountered in a book in a reallly long time. I’m always too rational to feel strong emotion a majority of the time, but as I found myself drawn into this tale I found myself feeling really strongly about the characters. Interwoven with the rational narrative are a few dream-like sequences that play out as if they are truly the dream realm transmuted to readable form. I’m purposely not revealing much of the story because I always wished that I could learn the basic gist of a book without having a lot of spoilers. One thing I will reveal is that Ig eventually becomes a literal devil, a red-tinged creature of supernatural powers, and he learns to harness that power to give the sweetest revenge to that bastard who really deserves every last goddammed thing that comes to him.