In recognition of this IRL Friday the 13th falling during Spooky Season, tonight I watched Friday the 13th (1980).

I've seen this one a couple of times, but always in the context of a Halloween party or something, so this is the first time I actually learned the characters' names, which was nice. This was the first movie to try and replicate the success of Halloween, and it really kicked off the 80s Slasher boom. There are recognizable elements from prior horror classics as well, Psycho most notably, that make it clear there is more going on under the hood of this film than its reputation might suggest. That said, the plot is paper-thin, only about half the characters have even a single actual personality trait, and there is a recurring theme of casual racism towards native Americans, so it's not exactly a masterpiece either.

The movie begins on Friday the 13th, 1958, with a bunch of camp counselors hanging out singing christian folk songs to each-other, as teenagers are wont to do any time they are left unsupervised. A pair of somewhat less godbothering members of the group slip off to make whoopie in one of the cabins, only to be brutally slain in a sequence shot from the killer's perspective, concealing their identity. Until the climax of the film all of the kills will be shot this way, or otherwise obscured in such a way as to preserve the 'twist' of the killer's identity.

Annie (Robbi Morgan), Alice (Adrienne King), Bill (Harry Crosby), Ned (Mark Nelson), Jack (Kevin Bacon, in one of his very first appearances), Brenda (Laurie Bertram), and Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) arrive at the camp years later (in "Present Day" which becomes increasingly hilarious the farther we get from whatever 'present' is depicted in a film) as it is being renovated and reopened by Steve, a man who is 30% porn-stache and 60% jorts. The counselors-to-be are warned off by local doom-sayer, Ralph, whose depiction of a Cassandra-like prophetic weirdo inspired a whole horror genre stock character that still gets some mileage these days.

The gore in this movie is fairly inventive, if clearly low-budget. Tom Savini worked on a lot of the effects, and his fingerprints are most obvious in the excellent scene where Kevin Bacon has an arrow shoved through his throat from underneath his bed. Once the identity of the killer is revealed some of the kills feel a little implausibe in hindsight (such as Bill being lifted fully off of the ground and impaled with multiple arrows) but it's not hard to justify including fun practical effects in every kill when you're making a Slahser film, no matter how much or little sense it makes.

I like this movie. This and the first sequel codified about a billion 80s horror movie tropes, so they can feel a little over-played when watching them today, but that's more Seinfeld Effect than a real criticism of the films. My biggest actual gripe with this movie is that the ending is absolutely terrible. There are two places where the film could have cut to credits and been fantastic. When Alice is discovered adrift on the canoe by the police, the morning of the 14th, the film could have ended and been a solid, if not very meaty, horror narrative. The second option would have been to keep the next few seconds and end on Jason pulling Alice into the lake, which mkaes zero sense but is a fantastic shocker ending. Instead, the film does both and then takes us to a hospital scene where it is immediately revealed that Alice is just fine, and maybe she just dreamed Jason, or maybe not, but either way she's going to be okay. I hate cop-out endings in horror films. You've already brutally murdered 80% of the cast, you don't need to give us a happily-ever-after (even if Alice is concerned that Jason may still be alive).

I'm going to give this one a 3.5/5. I considered bumping it up to 4/5 considering the legacy this film has, but I try to only give stars based on an individual film's merits, and this one is just okay. It is occasionally quite good, and then for long stretches it's kind of boring. The reveal that the killer is a little old lady who may or may not share her head with her dead son is genuinely great and surprising, and it would have been completely sufficiently scary without throwing all the logic out the window at the very end, but even that doesn't completely spoil what is an extremely 'okay' film in my final evaluation.

Last night I resumed my Halloween-athon with Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988).

I never watched most of these higher-numbered sequels when I was a kid, so this is uncharted territory for me. This film sought (as it says on the tin) to return Michael Myers to the franchise after fans were left confused and angry by his absence from the last installment. Apparently, John Carpenter and Debra Hill were originally attached to this and intended to produce 4 as a ghost story, but when Moustapha Akkad demanded that Michael return in the flesh, they left the project and sold their stake in the series. That's a real shame, because I would have loved to see more of Carpenter's vision for the series.

What this film ended up being is a soft-reboot of the series, following the plot of the first movie beat by beat, with a slight twist here and there to keep it from being a straight remake. Despite having been completely incinerated in a massive fireball, with visual confirmation of Michael's body being reduced to ashes, both he and Dr. Loomis reappear in this film with some minor cosmetic burns, and in Loomis' case, a limp. I guess a little of Michael's supernatural durability rubbed off on him. Not Laurie though. She's dead as a door-nail, off-screen (I think they said it was a car crash, but this movie cares so little about Laurie that they may not have even explained the cause), and the focus has shifted to her young daughter, Jamie (Danielle Harris).

Once again Michael is being transferred between facilities (instead of dumped into a pit filled with wet cement, for some reason), on the eve of the tenth anniversary of his worst crimes. The orderlies in the ambulance let slip that Michael has a niece, and he immediately awakens from his ten-year coma to go do something about that. Jamie is being raised by the Carruthers, and has a step-sister named Rachel (Ellie Cornell). Rachel will basically be this movie's Laurie, with the standout difference being that she can kind of talk to boys. Michael repeats his original routine pretty much exactly; killing a mechanic for his overalls and robbing the hardware store for his mask (which they are still selling, in the town where the murders occurred, ten years later. Yikes.)

Jamie mostly slots into the story where Tommy and Lindsey were in the original. She is relentlessly bullied by kids at school for her relationship to the 'Bogeyman', and is supposed to be watched by Rachel while their parents are off at a Halloween party. The one interesting thing about her character is that she seems equally drawn to and repulsed by Michael's story. She is too scared to go trick-or-treating, but changes her mind after being bullied, and asks to go buy a costume. The one she chooses is instantly recognizable as the clown costume that young Michael was wearing when he killed Judith back in 1963. As she tries on the mask she sees herself as Michael, and then sees Michael bearing down on her, ready to kill. It turns out to be a dream, or vision, but Michael really is either inside or just outside the store, at that moment, waiting to grab his Shatner mask. If you watch movies at all, or just have a basic understanding of foreshadowing, it's blindingly obvious at this point where the movie is going, even if I want it not to.

The plot unfolds just like it did the first time, more or less, with Michael bumping off a few more folks on-screen this time, and Loomis running around with a different Sheriff. There's also a mob of angry bar patrons who decide to go lynch Michael when they hear he's escaped, which is kind of fun. Overall though, it just feels far, far too similar to the original. They even recreate the original score almost exactly, rather than punch it up as in II, or create a new composition as in III.

The big 'twist' ending comes after Michael has been blown away by a redneck firing squad (which will surely keep him down this time...), and Jamie briefly touches his hand. Loomis is finally ready to breathe a sigh of relief when Jamie puts on her clown mask, proceeds up the stairs, and murders Rachel with a pair of scissors. We end on a close-in push on Loomis' face as he just howls "No! No! No!" over and over, as he realizes that whatever inhuman evil it was that animated Michael long beyond his limits, has passed into Jamie.

I'll be honest, I was bored most of the time I was watching this. Once I realized just how much it was going to retread the original, it was hard to stay focused. It's not badly made, and most of the elements that made the original great are here, intact, but there is nothing new or interesting about this installment. It really feels like Moustapha Akkad was trying to pull a fast one here, relaunching the franchise without its originators by just copying what they had made to the best of his ability. If Donald Pleasence hadn't returned for this, it would feel very much like a made-for-TV adaptation of the original movie, and his presence can only elevate the film so far.

I'll give this one 3/5 stars. I was tempted to go lower, but the film is not poorly made on a technical level. If the direct references to a prior film were removed, this would be an okay (but not great) remake of Halloween, and I do fundamentally like the Halloween formula. I am curious to see where it goes from here. If Jamie actually returns in full The Shape mode, I will be very pleased, but I'm not expecting it to happen. Speaking of The Shape, it is portrayed in this one by George P. Wilbur, and (no disrespect to him, he's had a long successful career in stunt work) it's just lacking something. At first I thought Michael was too visible most of the time, but in the original he stands in full sunlight, completely exposed a few times, and it's still scary. In this one he just lacks the presence necessary to be scary while completely silent, and it noticeably detracts from the experience. So yeah, I don't recommend this one unless you are a fellow completionist and your brain won't let you skip it. On to the next!

Apparently Halloweens 4-6 form something of a trilogy, so before I tackle that, I decided on a nice palate cleanser in the form of rewatching Ghostbusters (1984).

I don't have anything to say about this movie that hasn't been said before. It's great. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are just phenomenally funny people, and their script remains one of the most quotable of all time. Bill Murray is Bill Murray (more on that in a second). I always appreciate seeing Sigourney Weaver, and her portrayal of Zuul Dana is delicious. The real stars of the film for me though are the excellent effects, both practical and special. There are so many cool set pieces, and every ghoulie that we see has a distinct design and characterization to them (admittedly there aren't that many, but it's still great, the zombie cab driver cracks me up every time).

The plot follows Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), disgraced parapsychologist, and his colleagues Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) as they address a growing wave of supernatural phenomena in the New York area. Venkman is an asshole. Like, full stop. He's a gross, condescending creep who abuses any position of authority given to him to harass women as his first priority, at all times. Maybe the only real flaw in this movie is that it treats Venkman's behavior as cute because it's Bill Murray, which is harder and harder to swallow as the general consensus on Murray continues to shift over the years. I enjoy Bill Murray the most when his characters are handled by the film with the understanding that he is being an asshole, as in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), or Rushmore (1998), or really any Wes Anderson movie now that I think about it. He's very funny in Ghostbusters, in exactly the same way as he's funny in those movies, but this movie asks us to condone his behavior in a way that the others don't. That's all I'll say about the confluence of real-life Bill Murray and screen Bill Murray, because it's genuinely not that hard to enjoy this movie even if you know that he was probably a raging asshole the whole time they were making it.

Ray and Egon are true believers, and serious men of science in contrast to Venkman's lazy skepticism. After they collectively experience their first confirmed supernatural phenomenon they are all generally on the same page about the existence of the ghosts, though Venkman continues to offer sardonic one liners during each encounter because that is his primary function in the script. The three men go into business together after Venkman is expelled from the university where he works (presumably for all manner of unethical relations with students, given the ESP 'trial' we see him administering at the beginning of the film) and set up shop in an abandoned fire station. They hire a delightful receptionist played by Annie Potts, and eventually add Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson, who I last saw in Leviathan) to help them run the place, and swiftly go about taking calls.

Sigourney Weaver plays Dana, a woman who's very apartment rests at the nexus of dark forces marshalled by Gozer the Gozerian, an ancient Sumerian demigod. Rick Moranis plays Louis, Dana's obnoxious chatterbox of a neghbor. He is so ridiculous, and one of the absolute funniest scenes in the movie depicts a party that he's hosting, in which he roams around obliviously airing out everyone's dirty laundry and essentially calling them rubes to their faces (before being chased out of the room by a gargoyle dog thing). Dana good-naturedly humors him throughout the film, and she is the client around whom the plot revolves. She initially seeks out the Ghostbusters after spectral activity in her apartment causes eggs to go flying and a bizarre portal to open in the back of her refrigerator (where she first hears the name 'Zuul'). Venkman agrees to investigate for purely prurient reasons, and snarks at her the entire time as though he doesn't actually believe in the supernatural, when he very much does.

Over a period of weeks or months, the Ghostbusters take on dozens of cases, and develop a level of fame and notoriety. We get to see some of these early jobs, and they are whirlwinds of physical comedy, great effects, and deadpan snark from everyone. I think this sequence is what paved the way for the cartoons, and I would have enjoyed a live-action Ghostbusters series that was played like an action-comedy X-Files, where they responded to different kinds of hauntings and apparitions each week. I'm aware that that's exactly what the cartoons were, but the movie has a level of slightly more adult comedy (and not just in crassness, some of the best jokes in this movie just flew over my head as a kid because I had no context for them) that I think would have been easier to sell to adults in live-action.

The excellently hateable William Atherton plays a stiff-necked EPA investigator with an axe to grind, and he serves as the closest thing to an antagonist in the film, at least until Gozer is released. It is his attempt to shut down the Ghostbusters that ends up releasing their vault of captured spectres, setting up the conditions for Gozer's return. Zuul Dana and Rick Moranis turn into gargoyles, and Gozer appears in the form of an adrogynous woman with kind of a David Bowie vibe going on. The boys in grey do battle with the Gozerian, but to no avail, and it demands to know what form it shall take to destroy them. We all know what happens next. Something I thought was neat is that in an earlier scene Dana has a bag of Stay-Puft marshmallows on the counter, next to the exploding eggs, so they are established as an in-universe brand prior to Ray summoning the 100-ft Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to terrorize Central Park.

This is just a fun, hilarious movie. I wrote down like three pages of quotes to work into this write-up, but honestly you should just go watch it for yourself, even if you've seen it before (especially if you've seen it before, there are so many fun little details and I notice new ones every time). 4.5/5 stars, because Bill Murray can be a dick, but only if we acknowledge that he is one, and otherwise this is a perfect movie.

Tonight's feature was, indeed, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

I'll be honest, I went into this one with fairly low expectations. I knew exactly two things about this movie before tonight: That it was completely unrelated to the plot of the first two movies, and that this was the first one not written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. They do both return as producers, and Carpenter once more contributes his excellent score. With that in mind, I was quite pleasantly surprised by this movie. I have no idea why it was produced as a Halloween sequel, but it's not a bad movie on its own merits. Instead of a pure Slasher movie, this entry is a genuinely interesting (if very, very silly) Techno-Supernatural thriller, centered around a drunken, philandering Doctor Challis (Tom Atkins) and his somewhat distressingly young love interest Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) as they try to unravel the mystery of her father Harry's death just days before Halloween.

The movie begins with Harry (Al Berry, who played the ill-fated Dr. Gruber in the opening of Re-Animator!) running from a car full of men, clutching a pumpkin mask. He seeks refuge in a junkyard, only to be cornered and strangled by a silent, suited man. He manages to pin the man between two cars and make his escape, aided by the junkyard/gas station attendant (Essex Smith). Later that night, after he is brought ranting and raving into the hospital, another of the suited men shows up and murders him in his bed. Doctor Challis is (rightfully) disturbed by this, particularly after he watches the killer walk out to the parking lot, get into a car, and explode. It's a fairly strong opening.

I do want to mention that the opening credits sequence is very cool, and foreshadows the technothriller aspects of the plot, but it also includes a strobing light element at the end that is probably not smart to expose people to unprepared, so here's your warning.

Drunk doctors are in danger of becoming a theme in this franchise, because Doctor Challis has two character traits and that is one of them. The other is that he is super horny and will sexually harass and/or trade sexual favors with any number of his female coworkers, concurrently. It's not hard to see why he's divorced. Among his gal pals are a nurse, the coroner, and the ambiguously of-age Ellie (seriously, he doesn't ask how old she is until they have had sex several times, and while she implies that she is of legal age, she doesn't actually give him a straight answer. Their whole thing is kind of gross, very much not a Harold and Maude romance, more an old drunk taking advantage of a young woman's trauma response after the loss of her father).

We are introduced, through a serious of television and radio ads that play throughout the film, to Silver Shamrock, a local company that produces the most popular Halloween masks in the country, in exactly three styles, and not one more, which every kid in America is somehow totally fine with. Early on, in a bit that emphasizes that Challis is a loser who does not even have the respect of his children, they disdain his gift of cheap plastic masks, because their mother has already given them Silver Shamrock masks, which they proceed to put on and then stare into the television as it screams the Silver Shamrock jingle at them, counting down the days to Halloween. This advertisement is playing on every TV and radio in town, and presumably all across America, at all hours of the day and night, advertising not only the masks, but a Halloween Horrorthon with a special prize give-away on Halloween night.

​As Challis and Ellie seek clues to her father's death, she brings him to Harry's joke/toy shop, and we learn that he stocks the Silver Shamrock masks in his store. In fact, he had been on a run to pick up the latest order from the factory before he turned up at the junkyard, so the duo decide to take a trip to the factory themselves. They do not make any kind of plan before or during their considerable drive, and they drive all the way up to the factory gates before realizing this and deciding to go do that first. They head over to the town's combination gas station and motel, and rent a room posing as a married couple.

We meet a whole handful of people all at once, including Buddy Kupfer (Ralph Strait), his Winnebago-riding, all-American nuclear family, and Marge (Garn Stephens) who is also in town to pick up her order of masks, all staying at the same motel. There is also a helpful bum (played by Jonathan Terry from Return of the Living Dead) who directs Challis' attention to the security cameras, and presumably the curfew they are both in violation of, before meeting his end at the hands of yet another suited man. The little town of Santa Mira, where the Silver Shamrock factory is located, seems to be entirely peopled with Irish immigrants brought in to work at the factory, and the bum was one of the displaced prior inhabitants. Finally we are introduced to Mr. Cochran (Dan O'Herlihey, from Robocop) the distinguished owner of the Silver Shamrock company, and practical joke enthusiast.

After Marge is killed by the trademark tag on one of the Silver Shamrock masks (with some excellently disgusting practical effects), in what Cochran describes as a 'misfire,' Challis and Ellie decide that they must investigate the factory (after having a bunch of gross sweaty sex first). Posing as buyers picking up a lost order, they make their way inside, and find the Kupfer family waiting inside as well, apparently to meet Mr. Cochran and receive a guided tour of the factory, on account of Buddy being the highest-selling mask salesman in America. Some quick thinking gets them both invited to the tour as well, and they follow Cochran onto the production floor. At the end of the tour the Kupfer kid begs for a mask, and Cochran swaps out the one he's asking for with one bearing the trademark tag, explaining that the one he wanted had not yet been through "final processing". It very much sounds like he's bullshitting the kid, especially when Buddy starts asking questions and he has to make something up about volatile chemicals and such, but then they walk down the hall and there actually is a room marked Final Processing, which just begs the question; why not lie? Why not say it needed a final layer of sealant, or even just say the tag is part of the mask's value, and that's why he gave him another mask, instead of actually directing their attention to the clearly nefarious happenings in 'Final Processing'? I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does.

Eventually, Ellie finds evidence that Cochran was behind her father's death, but it is too late, a whole host of the silent, suited stranglers emerge from all around, and seize her and Challis both. Ellie is taken away somewhere separate from Challis, who is taken into Final Processing and given the big reveal, which is that Cochran stole part of Stonehenge somehow and brought it to California. He explains that he is doing some old-school Irish Samhain sacrifice, for the modern day, and demonstrates his plan on the Kupfer kid. When the kid wears his mask and watches a signal broadcast from the TV (the one being advertised constantly) his pumpkin mask is transformed into a real rotting gourd, and his head with it, bursting open and spilling forth snakes and insects which begin attacking the parents. It's a wonderful scene, with a very inventive effect, and it sets the stakes for Challis, because his kids are wearing those masks too. Cochran binds Challis to a chair and puts a mask on him, leaving him in front of a TV set to await his doom.

That would be a bummer, so Challis escapes right away, into the air ducts like a real 80's action hero, and to his credit, immediately tries to warn his ex-wife about the danger to their children. He's an unreliable, drunken liar so she doesn't hear him out, accusing him of jealousy and hanging up. Unable to save his kids that way, the doctor then tries to find Ellie and free her, as well as find a way to disrupt the broadcast. This leads him to a confrontation with Cochran that is bizarre and fantastic. There is a sacrificial circle for the (then) modern age, bridging the technological and the supernatural, and destroying Cochran's small army of what are by this point known to be weird clockwork/biotech/latex masked androids. Cochrane himself (or rather the fakest fake head in the history of fake heads) is lasered with beams of light projected by both the sacrificial circle and the Stonehenge stone, and it's ambiguous whether he is killed or if he has merely ascended to some higher form. He certainly doesn't seem surprised or unhappy at how things turn out for him.

Challis and Ellie make their escape from the factory, before Ellie reveals herself to be a robot doll thing too, although apparently a more sophisticated model than the others. I'm honestly not sure if she was meant to have been a robot all along, or if she was replaced while captive, because both are intelligible ways to read this movie, especially if you think Cochran was trying to manipulate Challis into coming to his town for some reason, a proposition made a little less of a stretch by how often Cochran mentions that he considers what he's doing a big practical joke, with Challis being one of its victims. In any case, they fight a grisly fight, and Ellie must be forcibly dismembered before she gives up the ghost. Challis proceeds into town, eventually running into the same junkyard as Harry did in the beginning of the film, with the station attendant even pointing out the similarity. He calls into the local broadcaster and tries to get them to stop the Silver Shamrock 9pm broadcast, and for a moment it seems that they aren't going to do it. Then the first channel goes off the air. The the second. There are only three channels because the past was terrible, and a long moment stretches out, the tension mounting, and then, it a truly ballsy ending, the broadcast goes out, and we close in on Challis' face as he realizes that every child in America, including his own, has just been sacrificed in a massive techno-druidic bloodletting. End credits.

It's a great ending that I think makes up for some of the very questionable choices made in the script, and I applaud Tommy Lee Wallace for going through with it. I actually enjoyed this movie a good deal, not least because it felt very much like it could have been adapted from the script for an X-Files episode. A lot of the best episodes featured a theme of ancient terrors adapting for the technological age, and that's exactly what's at the core of this film. It never reaches the heights of the first two films, and has some significant lows, but I did like this movie. I'm going to give it a 3.5/5 and reiterate that it is very strange that this was produced as a Halloween sequel instead of its own thing. They even lampshade that fact by having the original movie playing on TVs throughout the film, to establish it as a completely separate universe.

Oh, also Dick Warlock does do stunts for this one too, even though The Shape is nowhere to be seen.

I've decided that I want to watch the entire Halloween franchise this October, so I went ahead and moved on to Halloween II (1981) tonight.

This is such a great movie, and such a great follow-up to the original. As I was watching, I wrote down the phrase 'Bigger, Louder, and Meaner' and I think that sums it up pretty well. Everything from the score, to the sets, to the kills benefits from the significantly beefier budget that this sequel had over the original, without completely sacrificing the minimalist ethos that drove the first film. There is also a dark humor that feels much more like the rest of the 80's slasher crowd than the first flick, which had laughs, but mostly not at the expense of the victims. That's not to say that this is a mean-spirited or particularly transgressive film, just that the script has been fleshed out some and the universe feels a little less quaint and innocent than in the first movie. It feels more like a world that Michael Myers belongs in, rather than one he has invaded.

The plot picks up during the climactic ending of the first film, giving us an abbreviated version of events, and fairly smoothly transitioning into the continuing action. Donald Pleasance returns as Dr. Loomis, as does Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, and Jamie in particular seems to have grown into her acting chops in the three years since the first movie was released. Donald Pleasance's beard visibly fills out as he emerges from the house three years older, which is kind of funny as well. I should mention that the song 'Mr Sandman' serves as both intro and outro to this movie, and it works so well, despite not being set in the 50s/60s when that song was actually popular. I vaguely remember it becoming something of a recurring theme in these movies, but I guess I'll find that out.

Dr. Loomis pursues Michael out of the house, after firing six shots into his chest and blasting him off of a balcony. As we saw in the original, Michael is already gone by the time Loomis makes it downstairs. From here we get to see Michael stalking through the neighborhood, in what I like to call 'Michaelvision', long POV shots accompanied by Michael's masked breathing. The mask POV is arguably done better in the original, with the small eyeholes visibly obscuring parts of the screen, but the overall effect, with the heavy breathing and unfocused edges, is still very strong.

While Michael roams the alleys and houses of the neighborhood, the town is beginning to discover what has happened already that night, and flocks of people begin to converge on the house. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) continue to search the streets, and Laurie is carted off to the local hospital. In the ambulance we are introduced to Bud (Leo Rossi) and Jimmy (Lance Guest), who recognizes Laurie as attending the same school as his younger brother. I'm pretty sure this chatter between them is just to establish who Laurie is for anyone who didn't see the first film, but it also gives us our first glimpse at the wider cast this one will employ.

Arriving at the hospital we are treated to the sight of a child with a razor blade stuck in their mouth, presumably hidden inside a halloween treat. I knew this was something the news would get up in alarms about every Halloween when I was a kid, but I think this is the first time I've seen it depicted, or implied to be a real thing that happens. It's a great practical effect, and one of the 'meaner' jokes I mentioned, as the situation is definitely played for laughs. This is what I mean when I say it feels like a world Michael belongs in; there's casual cruelty in the background, without him needing to be there to inflict it. We also learn that the only doctor available (Ford Rainey) has been drinking, which might explain why he sedates Laurie to give her a few stitches, as well as draws about half a liter of blood from her right after mentioning her blood loss.

Back on the streets, Loomis and the sheriff spot a figure that resembles The Shape (this time portrayed by the legendary Dick Warlock), walking down the street among the trick-or-treaters. He's even wearing a similar mask. Loomis gives chase, and the figure lurches out into the street, where a cop car fucking annihilates him. It's so sudden and unexpected, the cruiser comes out of nowhere and just explodes into a massive fireball, with the object of Loomis' pursuit slammed between the hood of the car and the side of a van that also explodes on contact. The person in the mask is incinerated in seconds, rendering it extremely difficult to confirm whether it really was Michael or not.

​We are next introduced to Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop), a nurse at the local hospital who has been out at a Halloween party. We get a short scene with Karen and a friend of hers, that smoothly transitions into exposition via boombox, as a man walks by, the radio blaring out a news story about the murders, and broadcasting Laurie's location to the world. The film doesn't leave us hanging for long, and we get confirmation that Michael was not the boy killed in the explosion (It's later revealed to have been Ben Tramer, the boy Laurie has a crush on in the first movie) when he bumps into boombox-man. With his destination now known to him, Michael proceeds to the hospital himself. Ben Tramer's death is never mentioned again after it is confirmed that he was the one who died, and presumably the cop who killed him faced no consequences, as is tradition.

The rest of the film, more or less, takes place at the Haddonfield hospital. We are introduced to Karen's boss, Mrs. Alves (Gloria Gifford), as well as her fellow nurses Jill (Tawny Moyer) and Janet (Ana Alicia), and the hospital security guard, Mr. Garrett (Cliff Emmich). During one scene in the hospital cafeteria/break area we get my favorite exchange of dialogue in the film, between Bud and Janet:

Janet: "Every other word you say is either Hell, or Shit, or Damn!"

Bud (deadpan): "Sorry. I guess I just fuck up all the time."

Comedy gold. Bud also delivers the appalling line "Amazing Grace, come sit on my face" which is either genius or madness.

Jimmy is the first person to actually tell Laurie that the monster who attacked her is the same Michael Myers who killed his sister fifteen years prior, which seemingly unlocks some repressed memories, and we get our first big hint at the movie's big 'twist'. It has been pointed out to me that this movie is where I got the idea that Laurie is Michael's sister in the first film, because that is precisely what is revealed in this one, a little later on. It's been about twenty years since I watched any of these movies apart from the first one, and H20, which I saw in theaters just... oh god... stop thinking about the passage of time.​ Anyway, the idea that the two were related is something I had carried around, but I had forgotten that it was actually established as canon in this film.

The middle portion of the fim cuts between Michael eliminating the small staff on duty at the hospital one by one, with some pretty inventive kills thrown in, and Laurie desparately trying to hide and/or escape, while Loomis continues his search for Michael (I'm not actually sure why nobody thought to put even a single cop on Laurie-watch, or why they all thought he was done with her that night). Bud gets offed in the background of a shot focused on Karen, which is very artsy and cool, and then Michael drowns Karen in scalding water, which is a little less artsy, but still very entertaining. Mrs. Alves is exsanguinated off-screen at some point, and Garrett gets to experience Hammer Time. I'm honestly not sure if Jimmy is dead by the end of the film. He slips in a pool of Alves' blood and hits his head, but he makes it out to the parking lot with Laurie later on, only to seemingly die at the wheel. Maybe it was blood loss from the head wound? I don't think he shows back up in any of the sequels, but it was kind of odd how ambiguous his fate was left. I'll be very impressed if he does make a return. I won't spoil all the kills, there are a couple other great ones, and just about every moment that Michael is on-screen is impossible to look away from.

​The run-up to the climax is filled with great moments, and Dick Warlock really escalates the super-human force of nature feeling given off by The Shape, frequently just walking straight through doors and exhibiting freakish strength. The mask continues to be an incredible choice, because it translates the blank emptiness of Michael's psyche into an outward persona in a way that even the most talented actor never could, and paired with Warlock's implacible physicality, the effect is deeply convincing. I want to be far away from Michael Myers at all times.

There is a short scene a bit earlier in the film with dialogue between Loomis and officer Hunt (Ben Tramer's killer) where Hunt (Hunter Von Leer) offers Loomis a cigarette, which he takes, and then a lighter which he also takes. The scene continues and Loomis notably does not light the cigarette, he only took the items handed to him because he was talking and didn't want to interrupt himself to explain that he doesn't smoke (or so I imagine) and he walks off with both still in his hands. This becomes important later.

Loomis (who has been ordered by the governor himself to return to the mental hospital) carjacks the Federal Marshal sent to escort him, once he learns of the connection between Laurie and Michael Myers, and the Marshal takes it pretty well, all things considered. He, along with a woman who I think is meant to be the nurse from the beginning of the first film (although I thought she was dead?) and the Marshal return to the hospital, just missing Laurie in the parking lot. A tense sequence follows where Laurie screams for help and pounds on the door to the building, Loomis letting her in at the last moment. This is one of the moments where Michael just ignores the existence of a door and walks through it without breaking stride, only for Loomis to plug him six more times with his revolver, with exactly the same efficacy as the first time.

The climax takes place in one of the operating rooms, and it is absolutely perfect. Laurie finally gets to take her own stand against michael, shooting him once through each eye. By this point Michael's supernatural durability has been well established and it comes as no shock when this does not put him down. Instead The Shape blindly slashes around the room with a scalpel until Loomis hatches a plan.

Loomis and Laurie begin opening the gas valves on all of the Ether tanks in the room, flooding the room with flammable gas (Which, if I understand Ether correctly, probably would have killed everyone in the room on its own. "There is nothing so helpless and irresponsible and depraved as a man in the depths of an Ether binge" and all that). This is where the pocketed lighter resurfaces, with Loomis shepherding Laurie out of the room and then igniting the gas, killing himself, and seemingly Michael as well. The Shape emerges from the roaring flames one last time, before collapsing and burning away. It would be a convincing end to Michael if A. he had not already had one immolation fake-out death in this movie, and B. you didn't know that there are 11 more movies in this franchise.

Overall this movie is a very solid follow-up to the first, and makes excellent use of the larger budget without losing sight of the original's minimalist charm. I'm going to give this one 5/5 as well, although I doubt that trend will hold throughout the rest of the series. The third one is pretty rough if I remember correctly (and also has absolutely nothing to do with any of the other films). My final thought is that for all the bad sequels billed as Something: Part 2, this is one film that actually is just a straight up Part 2, and they decided not to go with that naming convention for some reason, which I find odd.

​Sticking with the spooky season theme, tonight I watched Wes Craven's directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972).

Serious Content Warning on this one, I'm going to talk about sexual assault a whooole bunch in this review, so hold on to your butts.

Holy Shit this was a weird movie. Wes Craven's first picture is a bewildering nightmare amalgamation of exploitation, horror, and slapstick comedy that I am struggling to wrap my brain around. I had picked up the basic plot of this film through cultural osmosis long ago, but this was my first time actually seeing it. I feel like I need to set up the context of the movie before I start talking about it, because on the surface of it, this is an ugly, heinous, offensively edited trainwreck of a film, but I am pretty sure that was the intended effect.

The plot of the film is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, of which Craven is a big fan. The idea for the film came from Craven's desire to present a shocking tale of violence, like in that film, but without the sterilization and glorification of the violence that he viewed as common in film at the time (in particular he apparently felt that the way Westerns portray violence as a force for good was damaging to Americans' ability to understand the Vietnam war). So he set out to make a hardcore pornographic film that depicted rape, assault, and murder in as realistic a fashion as possible, to pull the gauze away from his audience's eyes, as it were, and give them a taste of what violence actually looks like. He did not end up making that version of the film, which is probably for the best. What he did make is still devastatingly uncomfortable to watch, and it mostly accomplishes the goal of producing a watchable film that depicts its violence realistically without making it pornographic.

The actual plot of the movie begins on Mari Collingwood's (Sandra Peabody) 17th birthday. She and her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham), a queer-coded girl from the wrong side of the tracks, that Mom disapproves of, are going to go see a show to celebrate. We get to see a bit of Mari's fairly happy home life, with her mother Estelle (Cynthia Carr) and father John (Richard Towers) gifting her a golden peace-symbol necklace before she runs off to meet Phyllis in the woods.

The two girls run around by a picturesque river, share a bottle, and talk about their lives in what, to me, is a pretty clearly budding sapphic romance. It's not made explicit, but the chemistry between the two girls is easy and flirty, and they each represent countercultures that were becoming more accepting of sexual non-conformity at the time, the Hippies and the Punks. Having two young women at the center of the story rather than a hetero couple does a lot to ground the violence; you are never expecting the musclebound male lead to come rescue the damsel in distress. In fact, the police officers who appear in this movie are subjects of mockery and ridicule both by characters within the film, and the film itself. The message is clear: real violence is ugly and terrifying, often you cannot make a hollywood escape at the last moment, and help doesn't always arrive on time.

As the girls make their way towards the venue, we are introduced to the villains of the piece, a quartet of scum led by Krug (David Hess). Krug is male violence incarnate. He is insatiable. He imposes himself on everyone and everything around him, taking exactly what he wants and leaving only wreckage behind him. He is joined by his son, Junior (Marc Sheffler) whom he has gotten hooked on Heroin in order to better control, Weasel (Fred J Lincoln) the knife-wielding pedophile, and Sadie (Jeramie Rain) the bisexual sadist. The performances by these mostly first-time actors are bizarre at times, but gripping throughout. David Hess' Krug in particular is a force of nature that reminds me of a Stanley Kowalski type turned up to 11. Junior is used and abused by the three others, and it is he who lures the girls into their crash pad with the lure of cheap grass (himself desperate for his 'fix').

What follows is a deeply uncomfortable sequence in which the girls are tormented, and Phyllis raped, while Mari is made to watch. This is the first part in the film that we get to experience the insane tonal whiplash that will characterize the rest of the runtime. Phyllis' assault and the molestation of Mari are intercut with Mari's parents flirting and canoodling set to comic music. This juxtaposition will continue throughout, with slapstick gags and utterly inappropriate banjo music cut directly into the most graphic sexual violence in the film. An extended gag is made of the cops who are investigating Mari's disappearance trying to catch a ride after running out of gas, with everyone they meet trolling the shit out of them for being cops. It's a confounding choice, because on the one hand, portraying the ineffectiveness of the police force does seem to tie into Craven's larger ethos about realistic violence, but the actual comedic framing (and the horrifically tonally dissonant music, seriously what the fuck?​) are just so bizarre because they are juxtaposed with the most serious elements of the film's violence in a way that makes it seem like the violence is part of the joke.

The morning after they are assaulted, the girls are bundled into the trunk of the gang's car, and they hit the road. Krug has sex with Sadie in the car full of people, with the top down, as Weasel asks him what the 'sex-crime of the century' might be. Sadie quotes some rad-fem literature (she has a quirk where she mispronounces words, having only read them and not heard them sploken, that is actually an incredible bit of characterization for an otherwize sterotypically psychotic character) and eventually the car breaks down just up the road from Mari's house.

What follows is even more graphic rape and torture of the two girls, involving escalating acts of humiliation, including forcing the two girls to perform sex acts on one another (this is another scene which I think strengthens the sapphic narrative, as Phylis, the more experienced and queer-coded girl, comforts and directs Mari. Mari also seems far more devastated by this than any of the other assaults to her person, making me feel that the corruption of her feelings for Phylis are an intended reading of the abuse taking place, although Phyllis does call Sadie a dyke at one point, so who really knows where this movie's sexual politics are really meant to lead?). Eventually, Phyllis engineers an opportunity to escape, and give Mari an opportunity to run as well. She makes a valiant attempt, but is ultimately killed by the gang. In the goriest shot in the film the gang pull her intestines out and play with them as a group.

While Phylis is running for it, Mari tries a different tactic. Left alone with Junior she tries to appeal to him, to befriend him, and to get him to take her to her parents' home. Her efforts might have succeeded had the others not returned before she could wheedle him down. Krug rapes Mari once more, in the most graphic assault of the film. It is immediately followed by jaunty banjo music that made me actually shout "what the fuck?" at my screen. The gang+Mari look almost as lost as I felt in that moment. They all stand and sort of shuffle around, only briefly meeting eachothers' eyes, until Mari begins to pray, and walk into the river. Krug takes a pistol from Weasel and guns her down, with her body floating in the water like the painting of Ophelia.

We then crash headlong into another slapstick bit involving the cops trying to catch a ride on a chicken truck from an old lady who could not give less of a fuck about them. It's an objectively funny bit, but it is so, so jarring that it exists in this movie at all, much less as an immediate follow-up to the death of our leading lady.

The next that we see the gang, they have found Mari's parents' house and convinced them that they are just travellers experiencing car trouble. The parents offer to let them stay the night, until the mechanic opens in the morning. I should note that throughout the film so far characters keep commenting on the status of the phones at the house, informing us that they are 'still out' or 'just came back' in an order that left me entirely unable to tell when and whether they had phone access at all. To simplify that headache, Weasel simply cuts the phone line in this scene, and we're done worrying about it.

The next segment of the film involves the gang getting antsy and the parents putting together what has happened to their daughter, with Estelle eventually discovering Mari's necklace in Jr's possession, and bloodstained clothes in the gang's bags. We are treated to a sequence where John sets up a fairly complicated booby trap, as well as just spraying some shaving cream on the floor outside the gang's door, and Estelle seduces Weasel, drawing him away from the house. I won't mince words here, she bites his dick off. It is undoubtably the best moment in the film. I could see it coming from a mile away, and I still cheered when she did it. This is the first moment in the entire film where Craven's ethos starts to come together. The disdain for the police, and the hammering home of the banality of violence has led to this, the only glorified acts of violence in the film, where a middle-aged couple absolutely annihilate a gang of rapists and murderers. This is the film at its most Grindhouse, and yet, it's also the most conventional action in the whole thing. It feels almost like the third act to a real horror movie, and not whatever fever-dream this flick has been for the prior hour.

Just before the actual revenge plot kicks in, we get a fake-out that made me squirm in my seat. Weasel dreams that he has been awoken by the Doctors Collingwood, who proceed to chisel out his teeth with a hammer. That dream sequence I'm pretty sure is the kernel that eventually grew into Freddy Krueger and the whole Nightmare on Elm Street concept.

There is a fight between John and Krug that roams throughtout the house, and it gave me intense Clockwork Orange vibes, Hess is fully unhinged at this point, bleeding from birdshot in his shoulder, and goading the older man into swinging at him. There is a split-second moment where you can see a man standing in a doorframe behind the two men, as Krug advances of the wounded John, which I thought was a crew member accidentally in the shot. Instead, that tiny, tiny moment serves as the establishing shot which leads into Jr appearing behind Krug with Weasel's gun (There are tiny moments of technical brilliance like this peppered all throughout the film). There is a tense standoff, and for a moment there is hope that Jr will break free from his father's abusive hold over him, and try to atone for what he's done, but it passes, and Krug bullies his own son into suicide.

We get to see John's booby trap pay off, and Krug meets an appropriately grizzly end, hacked apart by a chainsaw (This film somehow does chainsaw violence better than the actual Texas Chainsaw Massacre...) while Estelle slashes Sadie's throat in the pool. The cops finally show up, just as John is jamming the motorized blade into the helpless, terrified Krug, and merely stand around, utterly incapable of rendering any kind of aid.

The film ends there, and that would be fine, if it didn't immediately jump back into that goddamn banjo music, and roll credits over freeze-frames of the cast that are directly out of some old sitcom. It is so jarring and inappropriate, I honestly could not tell you what the fuck Wes Craven was thinking when he edited this thing. And he did. He wrote, directed, and edited it himself, which is the only way a movie like this ever gets made.

On the subject of the music, there is a sort of 'theme song' called The Road Leads Nowhere that plays at several points throughout the movie. It's a folksy kind of tune with melancholy lyrics, and it's the bit of music that fits the scenes it's used in the most often (although still not always). Apparently that song was written and performed by David Hess, which adds a whole new layer to scenes where it is used, if you imagine it as something of an internal monologue that Krug is experiencing.

I have gone back and forth on how to rate this thing so many times, and I am still not confident in my decision. I think I enjoyed watching this movie, on balance. I was variously gripped, confused, revolted, and actually offended (something that does not often happen to me while watching a film) by the utterly bizarre experience of watching this one, and I think parts of it are just badly made, but other parts are crafted with a care and sensitivity that it makes it hard to write this off as pure exploitation trash. There is a kernel of solid gold at the heart of this thing, but it is totally buried beneath a toxic, cancerous mass of deliberate, in-your-face provocation. I am going to give this one 2.5/5 stars. This is definitely not the best horror movie ever made, but it's certainly not the worst. I don't think I'd ever want to see it again unless I was showing it to a group of friends or something though.

I imagine that I will be watching a lot of horror this month, so I figured I would start spooky season off right by revisiting Halloween (1978).

This is one of the first horror movies I can remember watching. The image of Michael Myers effortlessly lifting Bob (John Micheal Graham) into the air, pinning him to the wall with a knife, and then just standing there, examining his work, is seared into my brain for life. The rest of the kills are comparatively low-key in this first installment, with Michael resorting to strangulation more often than his iconic oversized knife. Regardless of the method, Myers is one of the few slasher antagonists who I genuinely find creepy, even frightening.

The movie opens with a long POV shot from Michael's perspective (although the POV is situated much higher than where 6 year old Mikey's actual eyeballs should be) as he covertly observes his sister canoodling with her boyfriend. The boyfriend leaves, discarding a halloween mask on the floor as he does so, which Michael retrieves as he slowly, inexorably approaches his nude sister in her room, knife in hand. The murder is quick, and not that flashy, but the first-person POV and the reveal that the killer is this tiny little blonde-headed boy still make for an effective shock.

Fifteen Years pass, and we are introduced to Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), Michael Myers' psychiatrist during his long incarceration. Loomis does not fuck around. He spends the entire runtime telling anyone who will listen that Michael is pure, inhuman evil, even referring to him as 'it' until asked to do otherwise. It's almost hilarious how little this film does to establish Loomis as an actual doctor who cares about his patients. He's completely right in this case, but I like to imagine him strolling the halls of the asylum, hunting down evil like a modern day Van Helsing of the infirm, blowing away any patients who get a little jumpy with his concealed revolver. In all seriousness though, Pleasance is great, and the speeches he gives throughout the film are an irreplaceable component of this film's perfect formula.

Our true protagonist however, is Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her first role on screen. Laurie is a bookish teenager, just trying to navigate high-school, the homecoming dance, and her two friends, who are the worst people alive. Lynda (PJ Soles) is an obnoxious mean-girl type, and Annie (Nancy Kyes) is oversexed to the point of child endangerment. Laurie, by contrast, comes off as chaste and moral without making her a completely sexless figure. She pines for boys, and seeks a more lively social life, but she's also serious about her studies, and committed to being a good babysitter, unlike the other two who took the jobs just to have someone else' house to get laid in. I'm not sure if this is the absolute origin of the trope, but certainly nearly all subsequent slashers ran with the virginal Final Girl outliving her more promiscuous friends, with sexual frustration even being the explicit motivation behind several of the iconic baddies.

The plot kicks off with Michael Myers making his escape from the mental hospital where he is held, on the eve of some kind of parole hearing. I distinctly remember wondering 'How does he know how to drive?' for years after seeing this for the first time, and I was pleasantly surprised to note that there is actually a line of dialogue lampshading this later on in the film.

Michael returns to Haddonfield Illinois, the sleepy midwestern town (depicted quite convincingly by a California suburb strewn with fake leaves) where he killed his sister all those years before. He catches a glimpse of Laurie as she drops off a key to the old Myers' house for her dad, a realtor. It's not clear why Laurie becomes the object of his fixation. When I was a kid I though that she was also Michael's sister somehow, and that he was back to finish the job, but no, she's just the first person he sees while we're seeing from his POV. Regardless of his motivation, he begins a campaign of stalking, following Laurie around town in his stolen car, silently staring, and disappearing as soon as she blinks.

Michael also seems interested in Tommy, the little boy that Laurie babysits, watching him for a while after he is bullied by other children, whom Michael completely ignores. In this installement at least (my memory is hazy on the larger franchise) Michael never actually targets children, despite this one lingering shot of him observing Tommy. My impression is that Michael recognizes something of himself in Tommy. Maybe Michael was bullied at a young age too? In any case, the ambiguity of his intentions all throughout are a big driver of the tension. Michael never speaks. He doesn't explain his motivations, or curse in frustration as his victim slips away. He's an enigma, and that's a big part of his draw.

The real action begins once the sun has set and All-Hallows-Eve has begun in earnest. Michael tails Laurie and Annie to their babysitting gigs, watching silently all the while. Annie and her charge, Lindsey, don't seem to get along nearly as well as Laurie and Tommy, and Annie eventually pawns Lindsey off to Laurie so she can go get laid. This will be her final mistake. Later, Lynda and her boyfriend Bob show up to the now-empty house where Annie had been, and proceed to shag and toss beer cans all over the place, until Michael decides he's seen enough and mounts Bob to the pantry doors. Lynda meets her end at the hands of a telephone cord, while Laurie listens on, thinking it's a prank call.

Disturbed by the glimpses of unusual activity that she's been getting all day, Laurie decides to go investigate, and hopefully find her friends. She does, but arranged in a macabre display including the stolen gravestone of Judith Myers, Michael's first victim. This is the first indication that we get that Michael has anything at all going on upstairs beyond a drive to kill. He is clearly doing something that makes sense to his permanently warped six-year-old psychology, but is utterly incomprehensible to Laurie, Loomis, or anyone else.

The climax is fantastic, with stunts, and fake-outs, and a great split-second reveal of Michael's face (portrayed by Tony Moran. The Shape, as Myers is referred to in the script, is played by the incredible Nick Castle, who also portrayed the Beach Ball alien in Carpenter's Dark Star) that drives home how little there is underneath the mask. Loomis is right, there isn't really a person in there, the mask is who Michael is, and when that mask is dislodged momentarily, Michael doesn't know how to react. The film ends with Loomis blowing Michael away with his revolver, after Myers has already been stabbed in the eye and the chest (at one point, after Laurie believes she has killed Myers with his own knife, he does the slow sit-up thing that The Undertaker always did in the ring, and I just now understood where he got it from. It's an incredible shot.). There is the barest moment of respite, and then, horribly, Michael is just gone. The nightmare isn't over, even if the film is.

Jamie-Lee Curtis does an absolutely outstanding job in her first role, and this movie would be worth remembering just for her. The fact that it also gave us one of the most memorable Horror villains of all time, who is still being depicted in new films to this day, is a credit to John Carpenter. His script, his score, and his direction come together to create something that isn't quite an exploitation film (despite wearing the trappings proudly) and isn't quite a traditional slasher (because this is the film that inspired the genre-codifiers like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street) but is instead a brutally effective tale of terror that I am always happy to revisit.

Halloween rates 5/5 stars. There are places where the finished product could have used more polish, but there is no denying how effective this is as a horror film, or how important it became to the genre. If you've never seen it, this is as good a time as any!

I followed up Them! with the classic Ray Harryhausen picture The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953).

This was, as far as I can figure, the very first Atomic Monster movie. There had been films with giant creatures before, most notably Kong, but the Kaiju genre as we understand it really began with this film. Beast was released just over a year before Gojira, and the influences on the later film are manifold. All of the basic plot elements are there, and the original script even called for the Beast to breathe atomic flames just like his Eastern cousin. The biggest difference between the two is the way in which the films brought their monsters to life. Gojira famously employed 'suitmation' to deliver a very naturalistic looking monster who interacted directly with the city he was destroying. Beast instead opted for the masterful miniature and stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen, integrating matte shots and technical effects with creature effects to sell the illusion of scale. Both films accomplish their goals quite effectively, and both highlight the advantages (and disadvantages) of either method.

The film opens on an Arctic expedition intended to test an Atomic device and collect some unspecified data. Our lead, Professor Tom Nesbitt (Paul Hubschmid, who was a Swiss actor who appeared in light-entertainment flicks produced by the Nazis...) and a colleague are hiking out to the detonation site in order to conduct their readings when they are attacked by a mysterious creature emerging from the ice. Nesbitt survives, but he is committed to a hospital upon his return, with nobody believing his tales of a giant monster.

Eventually, with the help of Professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway, who is great in Harvey, and also every other role where he plays a silly little doctor man) and his beautiful assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond), Nesbitt begins to accumulate evidence that the beast exists. Boats have been attacked, and a lighthouse destroyed (in the sequence that "inspired" the movie, from a Ray Bradbury short story. The sequence was already scripted, but when the filmmakers saw the success of the Bradbury story, they bought the rights to it and heavily pushed that angle in marketing.), making it harder and harder for the authorities to ignore him.

There is a lot of dubious scientific speak thrown around, a lot of it humorous, but one tidbit that stuck out to me was an Anecdote that Lee related about a group of scientists finding Mastodons so well preserved by permafrost that their flesh was still edible. I have no idea if that was true in 1953, but it definitely is today. In 2013 a group of Korean scientists cooked and ate samples of Mastodon tissue, finding that it was tough, but flavorful.

There are lot of great locations in this flick, from the Arctic sets, to the boats and underwater sequence with a diving bell, to the streets of Gotham itself. Harryhausen masterfully blended miniature effects with in-camera split-matte techniques to bring his monster into the same space as the actors, and it works extremely well. I won't sit here and tell you that it looks better than later practical effects, or even modern CGI, but it has a visceral physicality to it that makes it impossible to look away, even if the eye is never exactly fooled. The varied backdrops and destructable environments ensured that the gimmick never wore out its welcome either, I was always eager to see what the Beast was going to do next. The Beast itself is shown on-screen much more freqiently than the ants from Them! and even a lot of later Kaiju movies that rely on tiny glimpses to build suspense. We catch a decent look at the Beast early on, and then it's not a long wait before his full boat-smashing reveal. The action itself is fun and exciting all the way through.

I found the human actors somewhat less compelling than the cast of Them!, although most of that is antipathy towards Paul Hubschmid who seems to be an in-universe Operation Paperclip type figure, in addition to being a dancing monkey for the real-life Nazis. Paula Raymond and Cecil Kellaway are delightful, and I would have much preferred if they had been centered as the film's protagonists with Nesbitt being relegated to a supporting role, probably much like the one Kellaway actually plays. Lee Van Cleef shows up at the end as a National Guard sharpshooter, in a fun little role that foreshadows his long career as a hollywood gunslinger.

I'm going to give this one a 4.5/5. If I liked Paul Hubschmid even a little, this might be a 5 star film.

Tonight I thought I'd throw on some true classic monster movies from the golden age of the drive-in. I started the evening with Them! (1954).

James Whitmore leads the picture as Ben, a New Mexico cop on the lookout for a missing person. He and his partner, played by Christian Drake, find a little girl wandering alone in the desert, mute and unresponsive. A little further up the road a travel-trailer lies abandoned, its vinyl siding slashed to pieces. A bizarre footprint is found. Little by little the evidence mounts that something very strange is happening in the high desert.

This is the archetypal western Giant Monster movie. It was scooped (as was Gojira) on the trend by The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms a year earlier, but this is the film that cemented big critters as a mainstay of science-fiction in American cinema. Notably all three films use Atomic testing as the origin for their creatures, though each has a very different take on the concept.

When the local cops realize they are in over their heads (and the bodies start to pile up) they call in FBI agent Bob, played by the star of Gunsmoke! James Arness, who in turn calls in some government scientists to take a look. The doctors Medford are the most entertaining members of the cast; a father and daughter team of pharmacologist/entomologists working for the Department of Agriculture, their chemistry is delightful, and the elder Medford (Edmund Gwenn) delivers some truly excellent speeches throughout the runtime. Bob is less pleasant. His role seems to be to wear an ill-fitting suit, loudly demand answers from everyone, and clumsily hit on the younger Medford (Joan Weldon) while Ben does all the work.

The creature effects in this picture are great. The ants are freakish looking, and the eggs and other debris within their nests are very well done. There is one very naturalistic looking corpse that stood out to me as being almost modern-looking in comparison to most films from this era. There was blood, and visible injuries, but not overdone, and the body was placed very naturally. I think I was expecting this movie to look a lot worse than it did, and that factors a lot into how much I enjoyed it. The title sequence even holds a surprise, the film is shot in black-and-white, but the title, Them! is colorized and swoops in to almost pop out of the screen. I bet that was a real experience for drive-in viewers back in '54

The set design and prop work is all quite good as well. There is a sandstorm sequence near the beginning of the film that is just excellently shot, on a soundstage from the looks of it. It doesn't look real, but it looks like how driving through a bad sandstorm feels, with the claustrophobic curtains of dust closing in all around. There are a few shots like this that lean into almost dreamlike imagery rather than strict realism, and it really helps sell the tense nervousness of the characters as they prepare to confront the unknown.

There is a ton of actual military hardware in this film, from rifle-grenades to Bazookas, to a whole bunch of flamethrowers. The main cast was loaded with WWII veterans who had actually used the things in combat, so they look and act very natural in a way that was interesting to see.

The human drama is also quite watchable. The parts where no monster is on screen are always the roughest bits in traditional Kaiju films, and I can maybe picture three of the human characters from the entire Godzilla franchise, but the whole cast here had distinct roles and were given things to do in them that made for a tight, entertaining mystery/procedural in the early scenes before the reveal of the monsters, and a solid thriller for the rest of the runtime. I actually cared about the fates of most of the cast, and when one of them is killed in the climax, I was pretty upset about which one it was. (Ben. They kill Ben the hero cop, and let Bob the sleazy, incompetent FBI man live.)

The elder Dr. Medford drip feeds his suspicions to the increasingly impatient Bob and Ben as the plot unfolds, and even if you know already what the monster is, it's quite engaging to watch. At one point he gives a short film presentation on Ant ecology which was genuinely just a great little nature documentary (with some hilariously outdated factoids sprinkled in) that happens partway through this killer bug movie. Edmund Gwenn is one of the all-time greats, and he does not disappoint here.

There are jokes, and some of them are funny, but this is mostly a serious sci-fi picture. In fact, the degree to which it takes itself seriously was entirely unexpected. I forget sometimes that the trashy B-movies I grew up on were based on tropes that were originally played straight, and sometimes even had budgets to pull them off. This is a good movie, entirely aside from its legacy as the grandaddy of Big Bug movies, and I should have known that it would be a cut above the derivative stuff that came later. I'm going to give this one a 4/5 stars. If Bob weren't a useless misogynist, and Ben didn't die such a pointless death, I would call this a clean five stars, but alas, here we are.

We remain in NYC for tonight's feature: Rumble in the Bronx (1995)!

This is the movie that introduced Jackie Chan to America, and launched him to super-stardom. I watched the New-Line Cinema English dub, which cuts some scenes and adds others. If I can find it I'd like to see the Hong Kong/International cut as well.

My first Chan film was Rush Hour, released a few years later, and this feels very much like the spiritual predecessor to that film (Although the Police Story films were probably the more direct influence on that series, I haven't seen those yet). Jackie plays Keung, who has just arrived in town from Hong Kong, for Uncle Bill's (Bill Tung) wedding, and to help run Bill's shop while he is away on honeymoon. Complications begin more or less immediately when Keung learns that Bill is selling the store that very day to a new owner, Elaine (Anita Mui). We are quickly introduced to Bill's young, wheelchair-bound neighbor, Danny (Morgan Lam), as well as a very silly looking biker gang who ride dirt bikes and a dune buggy instead of regular motorcycles for some reason (the reason is dirt bikes are cheaper and easier to jump off of cars), who are led by Tony (Mark Akerstram, who is credited on Deep Rising, but whom I don't remember from that film) and the unhinged Angelo (Garvin Cross, who has had a long career as a stuntman in big name pictures).

We get our first taste of Jackie's skills as he finds himself drawn to a practice tree in Bill's apartment, delivering a series of practiced strikes so smoothly it looks almost unimpressive, until you remember that there's no way in hell you or I could replicate it, much less with that degree of nonchalance. He also gives Danny a Sega Game Gear, which he proceeds to play without a game cartridge, for reasons that are entirely unclear given that he only learned of the kid's existence a few minutes prior. This early portion is very silly, and the English dubbing is downright terrible, but it is definitely entertaining.

Before too long the plot starts happening and Jackie witnesses the dirt-bikers doing a very silly kind of race on the street behind the apartment, endangering Uncle Bill's humorously fancy borrowed vehicle. He intervenes and costs one of the riders the race, and the cash prize. The next day, after the wedding, some of the bikers show up to the store and start stealing things. This is where we get to see Jackie really show off for the first time. Grocery stores are up there in terms of best settings for a Hong Kong action sequence, and Jackie makes use of the varied terrain and endless props to absolutely jaw dropping effect. At one point in filming Jackie would break one of his ankles and spend the rest of the shoot in a cast and boot, but this fight scene is so rapid and kinetic, it has to have been shot beforehand. Even the stunts he did after the break are phenomenal, and the way they disguised his cast is fairly ingenious.

The central conflict revolves around a diamond heist and the fallout from a deal gone wrong, but before we get to that, the violence between Keung and the bikers continues to be on-sight, with the gang cornering him the next day in an alleyway and batting empty beer bottles at him until he's covered in glass wounds. Nancy (Francoise Yip), who was the biker that Keung interfered with, as well as Tony's girlfriend, takes pity on Keung when he staggers, blood-soaked, onto her doorstep. The day after that there's a fight that involves a giant mobile ball-pit. The beef is becoming deeply silly. After this goes on for a while, Keung, Danny, and a few of Tony's bikers witness the aftermath of the diamond deal, including lots of Uzis and a sweet car explosion. Angelo ends up with the diamonds, and the massive goons who are looking to recover them follow him into the building where Bill, Nancy, and Danny live.

The action sequences are so good, with every movement being intentional, and the plot macguffin moving rapidly through the space, but never in such a way that you lose track of it. Jackie was in his absolute physical prime here and it's a blast to just watch him go. Nancy works as a dancer in a club with a live tiger (giving me Roar flashbacks) and Keung goes there to meet her. Another chase sequence later and our romantic leads are established.

Since he's been running around playing grab-ass with the dirt-bikers, Keung hasn't been showing up to work, and those same bikers wreck the market while looking for him. Determined to squash the beef, Keung heads over to the punk warehouse/club where Tony's gang hangs out and proceeds to whoop so much ass that the apparent villain in this martial arts action movie straight up learns a lesson and decides to turn his life around. This movie is so unserious and I love it.

Once the bikers are on-side the focus shifts towards the bigger, badder guys, who are still looking for Angelo and the diamonds. From here on out the action just ratchets up and up and up, culminating in an extended hovercraft rampage that is shot like a Kaiju film with the hovercraft filling the role of the giant monster. The physical comedy is great, even if none of the actual jokes are very funny. There are about a billion and one lazy racial stereotypes in this, which is about par for the course with 90's action flicks, although I'm curious how much of it is a product of the changes made for the dub.

I'm going to give this one 3/5 stars, mostly on the strength of Jackie Chan's incredible physical skills and the fact that I was genuinely surprised when Tony just gave up and told Keung "You win." I may revisit that rating if the international release is less overtly stupid.

Tonight I felt like revisiting an old favorite, so I put on Hair (1979).

This is a particularly important film for me. I was already a long-haired weirdo who had just discovered Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles when I first saw a scene from this movie play on TV, probably on MTV or VH1. It was the jail scene, where the Tribe sings the title track, Hair. It was like someone had pulled all the words I could never find to explain why I looked the way I did out of my brain and set them to music. I asked my parents if they had ever heard the song before, and my mother pulled out her box of vinyl records. She handed me a stack including the albums for not only Hair, but Jesus Christ: Super Star and, bizarrely, Monty Python Sings, a collection of the songs from their movies. I was obsessed. I started making my own tie-dye and wearing Buddhist prayer flags as headbands, and I wore so many beads and bangles that I sounded like a walking beaded curtain.

We lived in a small town in Texas, and not only did I not look, act, or dress like the other kids my age, I didn't even fit in with the other weirdos, because I was fixated on a counter-culture that was decades in the grave. My folks probably should have taken that as a sign to have me evaluated for autism on its own, but the mainstream understanding of neurodivergency at the time was, let's say, lacking. I watched the film version of the musical a lot during those years, and it paved the way for me to discover Rocky Horror, and Little Shop of Horrors, and a whole universe of weirdos who served as my guiding stars throughout my childhood.

When I was 16, we took a trip to New York and spent ten days in Manhattan, during which I got to see the Hair revival off-Broadway. During the ending reprise of Flesh Failures (Let the Sun Shine In) the cast started pulling people out of the crowd to dance. I was, predictably, fully adorned in my home-made hippie accoutrements, and they pulled me up on stage to dance and sing with the main cast. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, and one of the touchstone moments that helped me start to explore my identity and self-image with a confidence and validation that I had never felt before.

All of that is to say that I have no way of objectively approaching a review of this film. It is too wrapped up in core associations for me to disentangle, so I'm going to just get the rating out of the way up front, and give it a glorious 5/5, with the understanding that you may feel very differently about it.

The film follows the plot of the stage musical pretty closely, though it omits several of the best songs, it does incorporate some elements that were impossible on stage, like live animals and vehicles. We begin with Claude Hooper Bukowski (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) leaving his home in Oklahoma, sharing a touching moment with his father before boarding the bus to New York, and the Induction Center. As he travels across the country we see the countryside give way to New England cities and a funky riff falls in. In short order Claude finds himself in Manhattan and we get our first glimpse of the Tribe, a street-roaming gang of hippies led by George Berger (Treat Williams, Deep Rising). The opening number, Aquarius, is performed by Renn Woods, and her flower-studded afro is a glory to behold.

The core members of the Tribe besides Berger are Hud (Dorsey Wright), Woof (Don Dacus, who played guitar with Stephen Stills and Chicago in the 70s), and Jeannie (Annie Golden) who is pregnant with either Hud or Woof's child. We first see the Tribe as they burn their draft cards, panhandle around central park, and mildly harass the horseback-mounted Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), a privileged college student and debutante. After meeting Claude and acquiring some cash, the Tribe rent a horse of their own and Woof serenades Sheila and her friends with the single funniest song in the film, Sodomy.​

The next song is Donna/Hashish, led by Berger, which plays out over Claude re-encountering the Tribe and joining up with them to smoke dope and sleep on the street. This transitions into Colored Spade, an intensely racially charged number that is well done in the film, but was absolutely electric to see live. It consists entirely of Hud calling out slurs that he's been identified with, and when the actor who performed the song in the revival gave his rendition he roared the words into the crowd like a challenge. The film's rendition is comparably much more sedate, but a little of that anger does bleed through, particularly as the song is framed as a response to Woof's racism and the possibility that Jeannie's baby will be black. Hud is proud to be a young, strong, black man, and he wants his potential child to share that pride (although this exchange feels very different in hindsight after later revelations regarding Hud's character).

Claude, being a newcomer to pot-smoking and the general hippie lifestyle, is rendered nearly catatonic by the hash smoke. He eventually comes around to the number Manchester​, where first Berger, then Claude profess "I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in Claude, that's me!"

The racial tension between Hud and Woof is then resolved during the song I'm Black/Ain't Got No, which was covered and mashed up with the song from later in the musical, I Got Life​ in an incredible performance by Nina Simone, which you should absolutely watch if you are a music lover.

The following day, Claude awakens on the street, huddled amongst the Tribe, and begins to wander off, unsure of how to proceed after his brush with a wild lifestyle unlike anything he had experienced before. I identify so strongly with Claude during the first half of this movie. I too was once a painfully naive hick encountering drugs and parties and rebellion for the first time, and everything from his posture to his awkward, halting gait is painfully familiar to me. When Berger calls out to him and asks him to come back, a little bit of the brittle icy shell surrounding my heart melts away.

The party in question is a high-society function where Sheila, the horse girl, will be debuting. Both Berger and Claude seem to have taken an interest in the Sheila, and so the Tribe attends, having seen the announcement in a paper that Berger was pissing on. In the stage version there is an incredible song, My Conviction in which a posh party goer expressed her (contextually) hot take of the evening, that long hair and decoration on men is the natural way of things, and should be embraced instead of rejected. It is a real shame that the film skips over it, although a 'lady in pink' as she is credited, is featured who is clearly meant to be the character from the stage version. She enthusiastically dances with Berger atop the banquet tables and admires his grungy style.

After delivering his rendition of I Got Life (Which is just so good) Berger and the rest of the tribe, including Claude, are arrested and thrown in jail. This is where the title song, Hair, comes in, and the film presents it in a very cool way, by having the opening stanzas delivered as Woof's internal monologue as he decides how to respond to the prison psychologist's questions. It's a great song, and I find myself singing it under my breath absolutely all the time. The interview also includes a fantastic exchange when she asks Woof if he's a homosexual and he responds "I wouldn't kick Mick Jagger out of my bed, but no, I'm not a homosexual." which I also spend a lot of time thinking about.

Then, for the first time, Claude's relationship with the Tribe is tested. He has the cash to pay his fine and walk free, but only enough to free himself. He likes Berger, and he seems fond of Jeannie too, but he's just met these people and they've already gotten him thrown in jail. Eventually Berger's charm offensive breaks through his barriers though, and Claude gives Berger the money instead, so that Berger can go round up enough cash to spring the rest of them. This he accomplishes by first carjacking Sheila and her brother Steve (Miles Chapin) and asking them for the dough, and eventually by going home and asking his folks. Berger's mother, played by Antonia Rey, is delightful, and we see a brief glimpse of the life that Berger and presumably the rest of the Tribe have given up to roam the streets and live among the hippies, weirdos, and dropouts.

The next segment of the film, as in the stage version, depicts Claude and the Tribe attending an anti-war rally and dropping acid, with it being Claude's first experience. The LSD/dream sequence isn't particularly true to my experiences with acid, but John Savage's facial performance certainly is. He rattles between terror and ecstasy as the experience washes over him, colored by the marriage proposal that Jeannie has just laid before him as a way to escape the draft (as they don't take married men with children). Eventually Claude runs off into the crowd, overwhelmed by the experience.

In the stage production there is a somewhat controversial group nude scene during the song Where Do I Go? which is replaced in the film by a skinny dipping sequence, where we mostly see Beverly D'Angelo topless. The song instead plays out as Claude roams the city, angry at a prank played by Berger, as well as frustrated at the casual disdain they have for his decision to go through with his induction. It's a solid song and a solid performance. The nudity in the stage version, even in the early runs of the musical, is extremely brief and mostly serves as a reference to a tactic used by real anti-war protesters. It was pretty cool as a 16 year old seeing nudity and the human body celebrated instead of shamed, and by a huge crowd of people, for probably the first time in my life.

Claude's wandering finally delivers him to the induction office and we get one of the most hilarious scenes in both versions. As the parade of nude inductees (including one young man who refuses to remove his socks until he is physically hoisted into the air and they are pulled from his feet to reveal a fully painted set of toenails) are presented to the Army staff, we get the songs Black Boys and White Boys which unabashedly celebrate the female gaze (and in the film version, the Gays as well). The juxtaposition of the raunchy sex-positive musical number and the fact that Claude is (seemingly) passing the point of No Return makes this a weird one, but they're such fun songs that you'd hardly notice on the first viewing. Afterwards Claude is whisked away to boot camp where he undergoes basic training set to Walking in Space which rises to the repeated phrase "My eyes are open" as the reality of his situation begins to finally set in.

There is a time-skip, where the intermission takes place in the stage version, and then the narrative picks up again at wintertime. Sheila receives a letter from Claude, and shares it with the Tribe. As they are discussing a trip to go visit him at the military base in Nevada where he is being trained, a woman and a small child approach the group. The woman calls out to Hud, calling him by the name LaFayette, and asking him what he's doing there, with those people. Asking him if the visibly pregnant Jeannie is carrying his child. This is, despite the deeply bittersweet ending, the emotional low point of the film and the musical. Cheryl Barns, playing Hud's jilted fiance and the mother of his already existing child, belts out a rendition of Easy To Be Hard, demanding to know "how can people be so heartless?" that brings me to full-on tears every single time.

If this movie has a single, serious flaw, it is that Hud's treatment of his fiance, left unnamed, is forgiven nearly instantly by the film, if not the character. There is an inkling that Hud is not a true flower child, committed to peace and love and harmony, so much as a selfish asshole who abandoned his old life and responsibilities to pursue easy sex and drugs among the free love generation. We see him arguing angrily with the other members of the Tribe between devastating shots of Barns' solo, but the content of that argument is not shared with us, and we simply have to accept, as the fiance apparently does, that some resolution has occurred. A later moment between Jeannie and the fiance gives the lie to this, but from that point on she and LaFayette Jr. silently accompany the Tribe on the next leg of their adventure. Jeannie comes across as cruelly blind to the suffering of this poor woman, and Hud is actively hostile to her the entire time.

I don't now why Hud was singled out to be the only member of the Tribe who is depicted as a genuinely bad or selfish person, but it gives us the most powerful solo in the film, so there is some good that comes of it. A charitable reading of the Hud situation might tie it into the otherwise fairly subtle critique of the flower-power generation that runs throughout the film, where the members of the hippie community that are the most vocal about peace, love, and understanding are sometimes the least committed to living that lifestyle, and even members of radical social-justice movements can be blind to the injustices occurring under their own roofs. The fringe lifestyle led by the hippies was deeply appealing to a lot of narcissistic abusers because of the permissive attitudes towards sex, drugs, and alternative philosophies. Hud represents those people, and it's a little weird that there are no consequences for his actions whatsoever.

The tribe carjacks Steve a second time, picking up Sheila in the process, and make their way to Nevada to visit Claude before he ships out to Vietnam. The song Three-Five-Zero-Zero is another racially charged anti-war number, inspired by a Ginsberg poem, and rising to an upbeat chant of "Prisoners in N*****town, it's a dirty little war" which I felt guilty just hearing on the record as a kid, but it has remained with me as a powerful mental image my entire life. It is arranged with What a Piece of Work is Man, and the jolly recitation of the violent phrases helps drive home the horror settling down on Claude despite his best efforts to hide it. In the film the songs play out over a hijacked PA system at the base as well as at another anti-war demonstration in Washington DC, and there is a bit of vaudevillian humor as soldiers try desperately to turn off the music.

Once the Tribe arrives in Nevada they engage in some more carjacking and kidnapping, this time of an Army officer, in order to sneak onto the base, where Berger takes Claude's place while he visits with the rest of the Tribe. One of the funniest lines in the movie comes as Berger, dressed as an Army officer and with freshly cut hair, orders Claude out of the barracks and into his waiting car. Maintaining his drill sergeant voice, Berger demands of Claude "Are you an Asshole, soldier?" and when Claude responds 'No sir' he fires back "Well that's too bad, because I am" and reveals his identity. It's a great moment.

While the two are switched, orders to deploy come down, and Berger is marched onto a plane with Claude's unit, reprising Manchester and singing out "I believe that God believes in Claude, that's me!" as though trying to convince himself, while the chorus chants "the rest is silence" behind him. Manchester becomes Good Morning Starshine/Flesh Failures and Berger's fate is made immediately clear as we jump to the tribe visiting his grave at Arlington. It is a startlingly bleak ending to a musical that deals with some heavy themes but is overall very cheerful and funny throughout. The refrain of Let the Sun Shine In is as powerful today as it was the first time I heard it. The credits roll to footage of hundreds of hippies descending on the White House lawn, singing those words, in a spectacle that recreated for the film, at almost full scale, the anti-war demonstrations that had occurred there only a decade prior in real life.

This is already a much longer review than I intended, so I will sum up my thoughts here. Hair is a triumph of musical theater, and the film adaptation does a fantastic job of translating the experience from the stage to the screen. There are a lot of great songs missing, but that is only because there are no bad songs in the musical, so any cuts will necessarily be bangers. I have strong mixed feelings about the character of Hud and the way that the film treats his transgressions, but overall the social commentary on offer is sharp, funny, and uncompromising. The music composed by Galt Macdermot and the lyrics written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado are as powerful as they are endlessly listenable. This film means so very much to me, as a turning point in my own life, and as a piece of that weird filmic vision of the past into which I so frequently find myself yearning to escape. I stand by my score of 5/5. There are elements that could be worth docking a half star here or there, but overall this film truly is a masterpiece.

After the sad dearth of Grier that was Fortress 2, I went back to the peak of the exploitation era and watched The Arena (1974), which is indeed 'Female Spartacus'. So much so that Spartacus is explicitly referenced in the dialogue.

This one stars Pam Grier (obviously) as Mamawi, a Nubian dancer captured by a Roman slave patrol. She co-stars with Margaret Markov's Bodicia, (who I'm confident is meant to be a Briton but who repeatedly claims to be from Brittany, which is a little bit funny if you're a big old nerd like me and you know that Britons didn't colonize Armorica and start calling it Brittany until after the fall of the Roman empire) a druidess and fellow slave. Grier and Markov had previously co-starred in 1973's Black Mama, White Mama, another classic exploitation flick.

I'll get right out in front of this thing and mention that there are several instances of forcible sexual assault in this movie, and in one instance it is depicted as a sort of just punishment for one of the film's villains, so if that's a non-starter for you, you might want to give this one a miss. For what it's worth, the first time this happens to a character, as much or more screen time is devoted to the grotesque, leering faces of the men watching on as to the actress' body, making it pretty clear that the film is not intended to be an amoral spectacle, presenting the assault as pure entertainment, there is a grain of commentary underlying all of the violence, sexual and otherwise, which gets highlighted here and there.

Beyond that element, this is an absolutely classic gladiator/sexploitation flick. Both Margaret Markov and Pam Grier are absolutely gorgeous, and the film paints them in fabulous golden sunlight frequently throughout the runtime. They are joined by Deidre (Lucretia Love, which could be a character name in this flick as well) a cheerfully drunken redhead, and Livia (Marie Louise Sinclair) a roman woman sold into slavery. The women are overseen by the head of the household, Cornelia (Rosalba Neri, as Sara Bay), a frightfully loyal enforcer who answers to Timarchus (Daniele Vargas), the girls' new owner.

Now, I could watch Pam Grier fold laundry for 90 minutes and be fully content, but luckily she's given a lot more fun things than that to do in this movie. From her sensual dance performances at the beginning, to her ass-kicking, trident-wielding, bad-assery during the rebellion, every moment with Mamawi on screen is fantastic. There is a brief bathing scene with full-frontal nudity of all the girls, including Pam, which is pretty standard for this kind of skin flick. Otherwise the nudity is mostly restricted to the love/sexual assault scenes, and both Mamawi and Bodicia's incredibly sheer gladiatrix tops.

The fight choreography ranges in quality, but notably Mamawi seems to visibly improve with practice in a way that feels natural. Having the girls actually learn and grow as fighters, even just a little, rather than be superhuman Amazon warriors from the start was something that I appreciated. Each of the girls also had a distinct fighting style. Mamawi starts off with a sick trident, and makes use of spears later on, and Pam Grier does a fantastic job with her choreo. Bodicia uses a sword, and Markov is believable with it, if not quite as flashy as Mamawi's more exotic weapon. Deidre notably does not want to fight anyone, and when she is forced to it drives her deeper into drinking. We see this play out through both dialogue and some visual bits involving her gulping down wine during the big fight scenes. She reminds me of a stock character from Vietnam war movies; the pacifist druggie who progressively loses their cool as the tension mounts, and always dies before the credits roll.

The interplay between the women is fairly well done. Livia the Roman is an absurd caricature of a person, but she's also representative of an attitude that very much exists among some people. Her character fairly well embodies the well known LBJ quotation about white supremacy and its role in keeping the wealthy in power, even down to her making racist remarks about Malawi and Quintus (Jho Jhenkins) and praising her slave master. The other girls each have their own perspective on their captivity and how best to endure or resist it. Bodicia finds solidarity and comfort with the other gladiators, including the terrifying Septimus (Pietro Ceccarelli), and Mamawi embraces the sexual freedom of the gladiator stable while plotting her escape. Deidre drinks. They initially find little in common despite their shared bondage, but the different approaches they take to their situation ultimately contribute to the success of their escape plan.

The actual plot revolves around the arena of Brundisium and the fact that the local crowd are hilariously bored of watching dudes murder each-other. Initially purchased as a lot by one of Timarchus' servants to work as serving girls, our heroines are thrust into the ring to provide a novel spectacle for the audience. The women predictably are not super jazzed about the prospect of fighting each-other to the death, and the rest of the film details their efforts to survive and to escape.

The editing is very rough, and several scenes end abruptly with hard cuts that don't seem 100% intentional, like they just ran out of film and so the shot ended. Part of this is up to the transfer I watched not being the best quality, and partly to the fact that it was a cheap B movie when it was made and they used the cheapest available film stock. That doesn't really excuse the parts where the music cuts out mid-scene, or actions that are the focus of the shot go un-dubbed. The grainy, scratchy, slightly yellowed effect caused by the cheap film is actually kind of cool most of the time. It's the aesthetic that Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez based their whole careers around, but it's the real thing rather than a meticulous and expensive facsimile.

By contrast, the cinematography is surprisingly competent, and in places actually quite beautiful. There is a close-up shot of Mamawi's face as she bears down on a fallen Aristo during the rebellion, with the sun flashing out from behind her hair, that is absolutely gorgeous. I want it as a big print to hang up on the wall.

There is some pretty distasteful homophobia in this picture. One of Timarchus' primary flunkies is the heavily queer-coded Priscium (Priss-ium) who expresses flamboyant disgust at the idea of touching any of the shudder women. By contrast the sex scenes are genuinely quite artful, and the presentation of sexuality as something that can be used to comfort and heal is a surprisingly positive, and even sensitive one. The contrast between the humanity shown to the women in this picture and the queer stereotype is one of the elements that makes it hard to judge this one overall. I love this movie, but I don't like a lot of things about it.

Ultimately this film represents, for me at least, the archetypal exploitation flick. The basic draw is sex, violence, and spectacle, but once you're invested in the premise the film has some solid social commentary underpinning its narrative. A lot of Pam Grier's films from this era, specifically, embody this duality between low-brow hind-brain engagement and a fairly radical political understanding. It makes a lot of sense, in a way. These kinds of B movies were made outside the big studio system for the most part, and thus were saddled with the dual attributes of not having any money and not having to self-censor to keep the bigwigs happy. Foxy Brown has a whole scene where Black Panthers discuss the distinction between justice and revenge, and at what point the use of violence becomes justifiable in the pursuit of either. It also has a lot of Pam Grier's incredible rack. The Arena doesn't present nearly so cogent a thesis on violence as Foxy Brown, but it does a passable job, and it embraces the camp and spectacle of 50's gladiator films in a way that is enjoyable and fun entirely on its own merits.

I'm going to give this one 4/5 stars. Half a star off for the rough editing and music, and half a star for the presentation of rape as a deserved punishment for one of the characters, and in particular the somewhat indulgent way that that assault is lingered on by the film. I know I filled a lot of space talking about this movie's flaws, but it is eminently watchable, and far less gross in the way that it presents (most of) the sexual content than a lot of its contemporaries. I heartily recommend this movie to Pam Grier appreciators, Gladiator aficionados, and habitual schlock consumers.

Based solely on the fact that Pam Grier was listed among the cast, I decided to go ahead and watch Fortress 2: Re-Entry (2000).

Christopher Lambert is the only cast member from the original to reprise his role (John Brennick) for this low-budget follow up ($11mil budget vs $48mil for the original). Pam Grier plays the head of Men-Tel, but clearly shot her parts in a single afternoon, mostly in one room, so very disappointing on that front. I suppose that's why she wasn't credited higher despite legitimately being the biggest name in the film beside Lambert. Patrick Malahide plays Peter Teller, Pam's step-son and the supervisor of this movie's new and improved Fortress. It's in space this time. Karen is replaced by Beth Touissant (who played Tasha Yar's sister in an episode of Star Trek) but it's okay because she's even less important to the plot this time around despite playing exactly the same role in it.

The core group of cellmates this time around includes Stan (Willie Garson) who's implant (oh yeah, there are implants again) malfunctions, leaving him absent minded and delirious, Rivera (Liz May Brice) one of Brennick's fellow renegades, Marcus (Anthony C. Hall, who is not listed on IMDB or Wikipedia's pages for this film for some reason, despite having more lines than several of the other characters) the comic relief/tech guy, and Max (Nick Brimble) a secret Russian spy.

Teller runs the prison station with the aid of several bored guards and one total psychopath, Sato (Yuji Okumoto). The tension between Sato and his fellow guard Gordon (Fredric Lehne) gives them something to do other than be faceless goons, which is a decent effort for this kind of film. The prison itself looks worse than the original, and there are fewer shooting locations. Teller's office (and a few of the other locations as well) looks like a dressed-up hotel room, and the control center for Zed this time around is little more than a closet. Also Zed is a kiwi now, and hearing her pronounce 'Death Sentence' as 'Dith Sintince' every time is utterly hilarious.

The dialogue is still terrible, but less fun most of the time. There are a handful of good lines, mostly between Brennick and Marcus, with probably the only clever line in the movie coming while they discuss their escape plan, and building a particular device. The gang has just discovered that their implants allow Zed to see through their eyes, so when Brennick asks if Marcus can build the device they need, and he responds "With my eyes closed," Brennick quips back "That would be the way to do it." so kudos for the exactly one good joke in the movie.

The film manages to be both more and less sleazy than the original. There is no actual rape scene in this one, but the threat of sexual violence is still presented as a joke. There is a lot more nudity, but it is nearly all female. Definitely no conga line of wieners in this one. Pam Grier remains fully clothed as well, so further disappointment abounds.

The plot is essentially the same as the original. Brennick gets caught while on the run with his family, including their now seven year old son Danny (Aiden Ostrogovich), and is spirited away to a supposedly inescapable prison. The actual escape plot is a little more involved this time, and there are a lot of little moments that make me think someone in the writer's room actually cared about this one. It wasn't enough to right the ship, but it was enough to keep me entertained long enough to finish the film. The two characters that sort of sparked my interest, Rivera and Max, get a smidgen of plot focus (and Rivera's breasts get some camera focus) but are left underutilized like many of the best elements of this film.

Overall this is an uninspired follow-up with bad CGI, bad miniature work, and a criminal under-use of Pam Grier. I'll give it back the half-star I shaved off of the original because they made some progress on the sexual assault front, but that still leaves this one hovering around 2.5/5. I would only recommend this one if you saw the first one and loved it exclusively for Christopher Lambert's performance, because there's not really anything else from the original here, and less to recommend it on its own merits.

My final thought is that Wikipedia claims this is an American-Luxembourgish production, and I am just floored at the idea that this is what Luxembourg is doing with all of that gold they have. They're the richest country in the world by density of capital, and they apparently use their hoarded lucre to make bad Christopher Lambert vehicles. I thought that maybe Lambert was from Luxembourg, given his bizarre accent (despite the fact that I had always assumed he was French-Canadian), but that isn't the case. He was born in New York and raised in Switzerland, by French parents. What mad Luxembourgish person decided that the world needed Fortress 2, and why? Anyway, I'm going to watch something with more Pam Grier in it next time.

Tonight I pulled down a DVD that I got from a garage sale and promptly forgot about for years, Fortress (1992).

I can't believe I had never seen this movie before. I knew from quickly scanning the case that it starred Christopher Lambert (Highlander) and Kurtwood Smith (That 70s Show, RobCop), but I was not expecting to see my favorite actor of all time, Jeffrey Combs, especially in such a prominent role. There is almost no marketing copy on the case, so it was a hugely pleasant surprise.

The movie takes place in the distant future of 2017, when the United States has implemented a one-child policy and total ban on abortion, in a flatly contradictory scheme to control a booming population (and harvest babies from newly criminalized mothers). Lambert plays John Brennick, husband to Karen (Loryn Locklin) who is pregnant with her second child. While trying to cross the border into Canada, where they can have their child in peace, the couple are captured and sent to The Fortress, a massive underground Panopticon, lorded over by Poe (Kurtwood Smith) and the AI control system Zed-10 (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon).

The Fortress is a private prison run by Men-Tel, and they treat the prisoners to a hilarious guided tour with heavy reliance on the slogan/motto "Crime Does Not Pay." Zed-10 and Poe inform the prisoners of the security measures in place, including the 'Intestinator,' a combination belly bomb and remote pain device. There are also red and yellow lines that the prisoners are not supposed to cross, upon pain of death. As soon as this is established we see a prisoner cross those lines and set off his Intestinator, and then the lines are never seen or mentioned again. Just a tough break for that guy I guess. The cells within the prison have laser-grid bars, and a series of ceiling-tracked robot cameras serve as Zed-10's eyes and ears. We get to see a surprising amount of full frontal male nudity as the incoming prisoners are processed, which is the only nudity in the film apart from a psychedelic wet dream reconstructed by a computer later in the film, so points for breaking the mold there.

After the tour, Brennick meets his cell-mates, including Gomez (Clifton Collins Jr) the other newbie, Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick) the old timer, Stiggs (Tom Towles) the skinhead rapist, and D-Day (Jeffrey Combs) the hippie-dippy bomb-maker. Another prisoner, Maddox, is alluded to but not seen. Stiggs and Maddox are purely stereotypical prison skinheads, and they attempt to rape Gomez pretty much as soon as the prison part of the film starts. It's cheap, gross, homophobic, and easily the worst part of the film. It's a pretty graphic, if brief, depiction, and the only redeeming factor is that it's not played for laughs (in that one scene at least, there is some other homophobic stuff sprinkled throughout).

Zed-10 and Poe are the weirdest part of the movie. She has a camera that can see prisoner's dreams, and seems to be a fully general AI. She and Poe run the prison together, and neither one seems to be totally in charge. Zed-10 controls all of the infrastructure, but we see Poe talk her into all kinds of things, often by making emotional appeals. The best line in the movie is when he yells through a locked door, trying to convince Zed-10 to open it, "Do you know what they'll do to you? You'll be lucky if you end up a Speak-and-Spell!" Over the course of the film we learn that Poe is a cyborg, and that he himself was a baby taken by Men-Tel under the one-child policy. He was modified as an infant and spent his entire life in the control room of the Fortress. Clearly the experience has taken a toll on him, because he spends his time watching the wet dreams of prisoners, to Zed-10's consternation, when he should be punishing them for 'unauthorized thought processes'. The more we learn about Men-Tel and the cyborgs, the more horrific they become, and it's honestly a very effective slow-burn escalation.

A lot of crazy shit happens in this movie. There is a fun gyroscope ride that wipes your brain, leading Karen to use Zed-10's dream camera to Inception her brain-dead husband back to life. Brennick gets savaged by dogs, beaten to a pulp by Maddox, and Intestinated all in one day. D-Day uses the power of magnets to remove everyone's belly bombs, and some fun is had with them after that. Several people get just massive holes blown in their torsos, and once the cyborg soldiers start dying we see some excellently creepy practical effects for their innards, all caked in blue goo. Zed-10 possesses a truck.

I just love Jeffrey Combs' commentary on everything as it happens. When they first take out one of the cyborg guards, he pokes around in the innards, muttering to himself "the shit they're coming up with these days!" He also refers to the bombs in their Intestinators as 'TNT on PMS' which made me giggle a little. Unfortunately, this movie conforms to the standard model of dystopic actioner, and everyone apart from the core couple has to die before the runtime is over, and D-Day is no exception. He gets a triumphant send-off which is nice, but it would be great to see one of these super silly action movies where a few more of the secondary characters make it to the end credits. They even get Gomez in the last few moments, and Abraham was marked for death from the moment he appeared on screen, in all his budget Morgan Freeman glory (He's the other one I would have liked to see live, the non-rapist cellmates were both fun characters with more stories to tell, they should have lived).

This movie is pretty stupid from start to finish, but there are so many elements that I love about it, it's hard to decide what score it deserves. I think I'm going to call it a 2.5/5. If the completely unnecessary prison rape trope was excised completely, I would bump it up another half star at least, but it's more than just a line of dialogue and so it has to be reflected in the score. With that major caveat, I would still recommend this one for fans of Christopher Lambert's hilarious accent, Kurtwood Smith's unnerving smile, or Jeffrey Combs' genius everything.

I went ahead and made Deep Rising (1998) the finale to my underwater marathon.

Released in '98 rather than '89, Deep Rising is a fun, dumb, summer schlockbuster.

This movie has a pretty stellar cast. Treat Williams, who I will always love for playing Berger in the Hair film adaptation, plays Finnegan, a hopelessly trusting mercenary boat captain of some sort, who lives by the motto "If the cash is there, we do not care," a credo that immediately lands him in hot water as he takes on a crew of heavily armed criminals without even asking where they are going. Finnegan's ship is crewed by Joey the engineer (Kevin J O'Conner, Beni from The Mummy (1999)), and Leila (Una Damon) who dies so early and unceremoniously that I was sure it was a fake-out all the way until the credits rolled. The fabulous Wes Studi plays Hanover, the leader of the thieves, and his gang includes some great character actors, particularly Jason Flemyng and Djimon Hounsou. Simultaneously with Hanover's heist, cat burglar Trillian (Famke Janssen) is also attempting to rob the floating casino that serves as the location for most of the movie. Anthony Heald rounds out the main cast as the loathsome capitalist behind the Argonautica cruise ship, Simon Canton.

The dialogue is truly terrible, but in a way that wraps around to being fun again. Everyone speaks exclusively in cliches, and the first few minutes include three different characters angrily shouting "X, my ass!" in a way that lets you know the screenwriters thought they were really doing something. The little moments between characters are frequently funny, even if no line of dialogue ever feels like it was delivered by an actual human being. I think my favorite moment is a one such quiet exchange between Finnegan and Joey; "Whatcha got there? Peanut. Peanut? Peanut."

The basic plot is that Hanover's crew have hired Finnegan to get them to an undisclosed location along with a cargo that turns out to be a bunch of torpedoes. They plan to rob the vault of the Argonautica and then scuttle the ship. Canton, the businessman, serves as their man on the inside, hoping to cash in on the insurance policy for the boat to bail him out of his poor financial decisions. These schemes are interrupted by the presence of giant, tentacled worm monsters from the deep. They aren't mutants, or aliens, or prehistoric crustaceans this time, just a nasty beastie that apparently lives in the area, according to the opening text dump. The creatures quickly consume nearly everyone aboard and our heroes have to make their way around the stricken vessel, avoiding the monsters and searching for the loot.

Treat Williams looks and acts bizarrely like Lonestar from SpaceBalls in this movie, but everyone else is so ridiculous that it doesn't stand out as an oddity. Famke Janssen is gorgeous and fun, while Hanover's crew all chew the scenery like mad dogs. Joey was the standout character for me though. He plays the long-suffering-nerd archetype, and does it well, although it really bothers me that his relationship with Leila is made use of in a scene exactly twice before she is killed, and he spends the whole movie not knowing that she's dead, until the end, and then he goes right back to wisecracking after a moment of emotion. The writers clearly did not have a strong direction for his character, so he ends up as the repository for all the comic relief jokes that didn't fit anyone else. The fact that Kevin J O'Conner is genuinely super funny turns the role from one that could have been incredibly abrasive into a solid comic sidekick.

The CGI for the monster is very inconsistent. There are a couple of shots that look very good, especially for 1998, and then there are plenty that look just bad, even for 1998. It was a very ambitious creature design, and I feel that it mostly works, but I will always dock points for CGI creatures where they could have been done more effectively with practical effects, and I do feel that is the case here. The limited locations in the film meant that they could have spent the time putting in place some really good looking animatronics and puppets, but they went 100% digital all the way. The explosions in this are also just terrible, copy-pasted stock effects. I should probably also mention the stupid guns Hanover's crew use. They have rotating-barrel assault rifles, like little mini-miniguns, apparently the cutting edge hardware in China. There are just so many problems with them, but the question that hangs over it all is why someone thought that this movie about CGI tooth-worms needed a fictional firearm in the first place. The prop designer must have been the director's nephew or something.

I had a blast watching this one, but it is truly trash-cinema. I'll give it 3/5, and that's probably too generous.

I continued the underwater theme today with Leviathan (1989). Another of the 1989 underwater thrillers, this film follows almost exactly the same beats as DeepStar Six, but I feel that it has both higher highs and lower lows than that one.

Our team of underwater roughnecks this time are miners extracting silver from the sea bed. I have no idea if this is an economically viable setup, or even if there is silver at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, but it could not matter less, because it never comes up in relation to the plot.

Peter Weller plays Beck, a geologist tasked with leading the mining team. He is completely monotone the entire film, and I can't decide if he hated making this movie, or if he's just like that. The only non-RoboCop role I have seen him in prior to this was Buckaroo Banzai, where I also noticed that he had a particularly flat aspect compared to the rest of the cast. Was Weller typecast as the stone-faced straight-man, or is this just how he performs every role? If so, I can see why he was picked for RoboCop in the first place. It's not a bad performance exactly, it's just that his emotional reactions (or lack thereof) are jarringly at odds with the scenes happening around him. If he was going for cool and unflappable, it kind of works, but Beck's character arc in this film is about gaining the confidence to stand up to his corporate overlords, so having him be cool as ice from the start is at odds with the text of the film. I'm probably overthinking this, because I want to like Peter Weller, but so far the first RoboCop is the only movie where he seemed to understand the assignment (Although to be fair, he's barely in RoboCop 2 at all).

Richard Crenna (Trautman from First Blood!) plays a world weary and cynically detached Doctor Thompson, in probably the standout performance of the picture (other than Jones). Daniel Stern (One half of the Wet Bandits from the Home Alone movies) plays Six Pack, the requisite drunken sex pest member of the crew. Williams (Amanda Pays) is a posh and proper Brit, who fills the role of Beck's love interest. Cobb (Hector Elizondo) and Jones (Ernie Hudson, Winston from Ghostbusters!) are miners and good union men. Bowman (Lisa Eilbacher) plays the apparently also requisite role of 'girl who likes the drunken sex pest character'. DeJesus (Michael Carmine) is the final member of the team, and I thought he was going to basically be analogous to Miguel Ferrer's character in DeepStar Six, but that ended up being Doc Thompson. Cult movie regular Meg Foster plays Ms. Martin, the human face of Tri-Oceanic, the corporation which owns the mining platform, and who repeatedly delivers the news that the team is not going to be rescued.

The creature in this movie is both far creepier and better looking than the crustacean in DeepStar, and the plot nonsense around its creation is a lot of fun. Basically, the russkies were playing around with genetic engineering, trying to make a fishman, and made something much worse instead. This picture heavily borrows from The Thing, in addition to the standard Alien stuff, and the body horror is done pretty effectively. I noticed that this movie had almost triple the budget of DeepStar, but it really doesn't look like it apart from those effects. The diving suit sequences are great, but there is almost no actual underwater footage in this one, and much fewer miniatures. It doesn't look worse than DeepStar, but apart from the creature, it doesn't look better either. They just failed to make back their budget, so it seems like the audiences felt the same way at the time (DeepStar Six made almost their whole budget back, but certainly was not a success either).

The chemistry between the characters is somewhat lacking, and while there are some funny lines, there doesn't seem to be the kind of easy camaraderie among the crew that is so important for establishing audience buy-in in this kind of movie. They just don't seem like people who have been working together for 87 days at the start of the film. That said, Hudson's Jones is a welcome ray of sunshine in a number of scenes (even if he's complaining in most of them) and his comedic chops do a lot to carry the movie. That's probably why he was one of the longest surviving crew-members, somewhat contrary to the stereotype (Although ultimately giving in to it in a frankly disappointing display. I wanted Jones to live, and his death was not cool enough to be better than letting him survive in terms of audience satisfaction. The movie was already basically over. That was probably the lowest point in the film, which sucks because it was during the climax. This parenthetical has gone on way too long now.) and why he was the only crew member really shown to have a relationship with more than one of the others.

One of my favorite lines actually was delivered by Weller. He threatens Six Pack at one point, telling him "I'll pop your top. All six of em". At least, I assume that was a threat, it kind of reads a little bit like homoerotic innuendo. The true comedic standout, Jones, responds to the news that Six Pack has some kind of skin condition with "The only 'skin problem' I see is white people," to the white doctor, which is pretty hilarious. Upon the revelation that the creature has eaten the blood supply in the infirmary, he shouts "we got a goddamn Dracula in here with us?" and I will never not find it funny when people refer to all vampires (or blood-sucking lamprey creatures) as Draculas.

While DeepStar focused mostly on stealing the suspenseful elements of Alien, Leviathan opted to lift more of the grungy industrial vibe, and the flamethrower specifically. We only get to see them used briefly, but for much of the film members of the crew are carting around a set of flamethrowers that would not look out of place in Warhammer 40K, as well as some other formidable looking chainsaws and pole-axes.

The action is fairly well paced, although as mentioned, the emotional responses by the characters to what is happening to them are bizarrely muted, again with the exception of Jones. I'm fairly sure that the ending was actually at least two different endings that were cut together, because we see the creature pretty definitively die on-screen, and then it returns to kill Jones. The post-rescue scene has a comedic tone to it that is completely at odds with the entire rest of the movie, culminating in a slapstick gag where Peter Weller punches a woman in the face (with a comic sound effect) and then makes a quip about it. I am convinced they added that bit after realizing that Beck's character arc didn't have a resolution without a confrontation with his boss, because his core flaw had been established as a reluctance to stand up to her, and he doesn't do that in a meaningful way prior to escaping the mining platform.

Overall I enjoyed this one maybe a little more than DeepStar Six. The plot is more ambitious, and the creature far more effective. That's why I feel weird about this, but I'm also going to give it a 3.5/5. I think watching this movie did more to make me cognizant of DeepStar's structural flaws, many of which it shares with this movie, than it did to leave a distinct impression. DeepStar probably should have been a 3, or even a 2.5, and this one only squeaks over to a 3.5 because the creature is so much better, and Ernie Hudson put in some real work here.

We've been getting rain for the first time in months, and I wanted to celebrate with some underwater films. Tonight I watched Deepstar Six (1989).

1989 saw the release of about a billion underwater thrillers. The Abyss, Leviathan, and even The Little Mermaid came out that year. Deepstar Six falls into the sub-category of underwater films that were also Alien rip-offs, which is not a small number, but I feel it handles the premise fairly well. For what it's worth, this one was a TriStar picture, and that Pegasus (especially the classic version) has rarely steered me wrong.

The plot follows a team of Navy technicians working on a deep-sea underwater platform to install missiles on the seabed. The project is apparently headed by a private citizen, Van Gelder (Marius Weyers), and he is pressed for time for some reason. This urgency leads him to rush the job and call for his team to detonate explosives over an undersea cavern. The entirely predictable consequences of that act play out over the rest of the runtime.

I was happy to see Miguel Ferrer again, and he had a sizeable role in this film as Snyder, which I enjoyed immensely. The cookie-cutter 80s action badass lead is McBride, played by Greg Evigan (Looking this guy up led me down a rabbit-hole ending in TekWar, a sci-fi series by William Fucking Shatner). There are three women among the crew, which was a refreshing gender balance for this kind of movie. Collins (Nancy Everhard) is McBride's love interest, and I'm not sure what her actual navy job is. Scarpelli (Nia Peeples) is some kind of scientist, and she is the first to raise concerns about the cavern and its possible inhabitants. Dr. Norris (Cindy Picket) is the base's medical officer, and one of the most level headed and competent members of the crew. Captain Phil Laidlaw (Taurean Blacque) does a serviceable Carl Weathers impression, aided by a glorious mustache. A young Elya Baskin also appears in this as a geo-scientist of some kind. Thom Bray and Ron Carroll play submarine pilots and the first hapless victims of this film's creature.

The last member of the crew is Richardson, played by Matt McCoy. I had an instant dislike of Richardson, and I couldn't put my finger on why (other than the fact that he's a smarmy, leering creep in this movie), so I googled him and realized that he's the bad guy from that episode of Star Trek where Troi and Crusher do jazzercise in the hallway.

The miniatures and practical effects, as well as the designs of the mini-sub interiors were all excellent. This film had a budget of only 8 million dollars, and they spent their money well. It's not the best looking movie that came out that year, but it's far from the worst. The creature design is great, and Sean Cunningham does a good job of teasing it out over the course of the film. The first time we see the creature, it has already claimed several lives, and it erupts from a hatch like an aquatic Graboid. That first look is impressive, but the monster has a few more tricks up its sleeve that keep the tension up even once it has been partially revealed. There are some very nice gore effects, including a chest explosion from a shark dart.

The crew have a chemistry that works, despite being so clearly cribbed from Alien, down to the breakfast table they all talk shit at. Both the Navy folks and civilians, with the exception of Van Gelder, exude an easy blue collar competence that I appreciate in this kind of movie. Snyder is visibly at the end of his rope from the first moment, but the other crew members manage him to varying degrees of success, with the familiarity of people who have been living and working together, in tight quarters, for months. The dialogue is cheesy, and most of the jokes are lame, but there are moments of real humanity between the crew, and especially between each of the crew members and Snyder, as his mental state deteriorates.

The sequences that were actually shot underwater were well done as well. The movie takes the time to establish that McBride can hold his breath for long periods without needing to spell it out, or like lampshade it with a swimming trophy in his bunk, which I appreciated. In general all of the action and stunts were quite grounded, and the only places where the budget really showed through were in the exterior miniature shots of the mini-sub rescue scene, because the miniature kept moving around in ways I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to.

In the latter half of the movie things conform pretty closely to the formula for 80s thrillers, with each character revealing some heartwarming personal detail shortly before they are killed off, and a final couple forming as the survivors are picked off. Greg Evigan does a serviceable job as McBride, but neither he nor Nancy Everhard's Collins have much in the way of charisma, and once they are the last of the crew left alive, it's kind of a relief that the movie is nearing it's explosive conclusion (that would be recreated almost exactly in Deep Blue Sea years later). That's not to say that I didn't enjoy this one, I very much did, but the core couple are not the strongest part of the film.

One last thing that I thought was funny is how casually it is revealed that the missiles they are installing are nukes. I guess it would have been obvious in 1989, but the cold war was in its last sputtering months when I was born (at least according to the history books I read in school, I imagine the books written in the future will have something different to say about this period) a few years later, and that subtext completely flew over my head until it was spelled out. The base is also powered by a nuclear reactor, which provides a nice ticking clock for the climax, as it approaches meltdown.

Overall, this is a fun mashup of genres that failed to really stand out from the crowd upon release, but I think it's one of the better attempts to cash in on the trend of the year while still making something watchable. I give this one a 3.5/5 stars, mostly for the miniature and prop work, and Miguel Ferrer's performance as Snyder.

Now, the most important question, has anyone here watched TekWar? I am so tempted to binge watch the series, but I can easily see it being the kind of thing that's not even 'so bad it's good'. I love Bill Shatner, but the man has made some real turds in his time.

I followed up Gymkata with Bloodsport (1988).

Let me begin by saying that the real life Frank Dux is a delusional fraud, and literally one of the subjects of the original Stolen Valor. For the rest of this review, you can assume that any time I refer to Dux, I am referring to the 100% fictional character, and not the real-life fraudster.

The story of Frank Dux (in one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's first leading roles) is a simple, bloody spectacle. Dux is a young man who was taken under the wing of a world-renowned martial artist and who wishes to achieve the dream of his master's late son to seize victory in the Kumite. The Kumite is an underground, full-contact martial arts tournament held every five years by a clan of ninjas to determine who their greatest fighter is. The Kumite depicted in the film is the first time the event has been opened up to westerners, and fighters from all over the world have flocked to Hong Kong to take part.

Dux is some kind of military badass, and he has to keep his participation in the tournament a secret from the higher ups, who are apparently more concerned with him getting hurt in an MMA fight than whatever it is that he does for the military. Not getting shot at, I guess. Maybe he's a translator or something, and that's why they care so much about him? In any case, he goes AWOL and two agents (one played by a young Forest Whitaker) are dispatched to ineffectually tail him and periodically threaten him with tasers.

On his way out of the country, Dux stops at the home of his aging master, Tanaka (Roy Chiao) and we are treated to a flashback sequence that details all of Dux' history with Tanaka, while occasionally cutting back to Van Damme's impassive face to remind us that there's a present-day narrative that we'll be getting back to any day now. Most of the training montage content of this martial arts flick is also flashback content, like a delicious trope sandwich.

Once he's in Hong Kong, Dux quickly encounters Ray Jackson (Don Gibb), a foul-mouthed and publicly drunken sex pest, but an instantly loyal friend to Dux. Gibb's performance reminded me a lot of Mick Foley's in-ring persona Mankind, and I kind of wonder if he was a fan of this movie. The two men share a strong physical resemblance as well. Leah Ayres plays Janice, a reporter in Hong Kong to uncover the secrets of the Kumite, and to be Dux' love interest.

The Kumite takes place within the Kowloon Walled City, which is a fascinating little bit of geography itself that sadly (or happily, probably, I never had to live there) no longer exists. It is also apparently regulated by the 'IFAA' or the International Fighting Arts Association. It's just so like a sports movie to have an organizing body for an illegal underground fighting ring. With the regulatory body apparently comes a need to demonstrate that you belong in the tournament, which Dux does by performing the Dim Mak, the 'death touch', on a stack of bricks, shattering the bottom brick but leaving the others intact. It's a fun moment.

The tournament makes up most of the rest of the movie, and it's pretty great. Lots of different fighters with different styles get to show off, and despite being coordinated by real-life fraudster Frank Dux, the fight choreography is more than competent, it's flashy and fun. The Heel role is filled by Chong Li (Bolo Yeung) who performs with charm and style. He does the Terry Crews jumping pecs thing a lot too, which is fun. The editors did him a little dirty by not dubbing in any sound for his cheers and celebrations, making him look like a silently screaming weirdo in those sequences. Jackson abuses his opponents on the mat with the drunken grace of a trailer park wrestler, which is a nice contrast to Dux' more refined and reserved style. They both make really wild facial expressions though, which is great. The fights are filled with great moments, like Dux uppercutting a sumo wrestler in the 'nads, and Chong Li snapping a kick-boxer's femur.

The dialogue in this film is serviceable, with some genuinely funny jokes sprinkled throughout, and a lot of line readings that are elevated to unintentional comedy by their scenery-chewing deliveries. Probably the best line is Jackson retorting "I ain't your pal, dickface!"

This movie mostly takes itself very seriously, which is funny because it is a deeply silly premise and the lead actor could barely speak English at the time. The blend of unintentional humor and solid fight sequences make for a thoroughly enjoyable watch, and I feel like this one is a solid 4/5 stars. The end credits begin with a series of title cards claiming a bunch of bullshit about Frank Dux' mythical achievements, but they're worth ignoring because the credits roll to the theme song 'Fight to Survive' which is a fucking banger. I recommend this one if you enjoy martial arts flicks, goofy Orientalism, or want to see Van Damme in one of his first roles.

I started today off with Gymkata (1985) because I couldn't get the subtitles to work on my copy of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, and the dubbed version doesn't translate the on-screen text.

Gymkata tells the story of Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas), an Olympic gymnast who is recruited by the US government for a top secret mission to the secluded country of Parmistan (lol), where a dangerous game (basically just an obstacle course) is held and the winner entitled to a single wish. The government wants Cabot to exchange his wish for permission to install a Star Wars surveillance satellite over the country, because this movie is a true product of the mid 80s. The feds sweeten the deal by telling Cabot that his father was a secret spy who was sent in to attempt the Game himself.

This movie straight up does not have a first act. There is a brief prologue where we see Cabot's father attempt to win the Game, intercut with shots of the younger Cabot at the Olympics, and then Jonathan is thrust into a training montage that also lets him speedrun the romantic subplot of the movie (with his conveniently mute-by-choice love interest, so we can skip all the unnecessary dialogue). Then he's off to Parmistan and a series of very silly fight scenes where he gets to do gymnastics to people with the aid of conveniently placed parallel bars and pommel horses among the anachronistic 19th century streets of the city.

Princess Rubali (Tetchie Agbayani) and her father The Khan (Buck Kartalian) are fun most of the time, and they have good chemistry with one another. The Khan in particular comes off as a pretty good king, if a little naive. His villainous vizier Zamir (Richard Norton) is suitably musclebound and nefarious. Kurt Thomas was apparently a real Olympic athlete. He won a bunch of World Championship medals, but never medalled at the Olympics themselves. I know absolutely nothing about gymnastics, but I guess he seemed like he was good at it. It does not make for a convincing fighting style, however.

The plot of this movie is silly, but fine, and the stunts are well done (if silly as well a lot of the time) but the technical aspects of this film are seriously lacking. There is a tremendous reliance on slow-motion and scenes that refuse to end just to make it to a 90 minute runtime. You could edit this thing down to a lean 45 minute TV special and not really lose anything in the process. The music also frequently does not match the tone of the action on screen, and it sometimes feels like they just didn't have anything that fit, so they reused other parts of the score. In that same vein, the ADR made necessary by the slow-motion sequences is not done well, which wouldn't be a big problem if those scenes were not so incredibly long.

Overall I feel this is a 3/5. It could have been tightened up and been more watchable, but not without bringing it below feature length. There's just not much movie here.

Tonight I watched Scanners (1981) for the first time.

I love Michael Ironside so much. Starship Troopers is one of my all time favorite movies, and since then, every time I see him on screen it elevates a film for me. Seeing him here as a psychic renegade with the power to literally blow your mind was a real treat.

Stephen Lack was also great as the heroic Cameron Vale, and Patrick McGoohan gave a moody, melodramatic performance as Dr. Ruth.

Where Zardoz's Eternals are sedate and melancholy in their psychic emanations, the Scanners are alive with ecstasy and terror. The dissonant keening that accompanies the instances of 'scanning', alongside distorted voices and other audio artifacts, makes the process seem deeply unpleasant for every party involved, although we learn that this is not necessarily always the case. Nonetheless, the facial performances by Ironside and Lack are something to behold, and despite being objectively ridiculous, they completely work alongside that discordant soundtrack and dramatic framing.

If you haven't seen this movie, it's where that .gif of a dude in a suit's head exploding comes from. That moment comes shockingly early in the runtime, and is sadly the only total head explosion in the movie. There are tons of other cool psychic powers on display though, from telepathy and mind control to telekinesis and fire-starting. At one point Cameron reads the mind of a computer, which is pretty silly, but it sort of works alongside the techno-thriller narrative the move has going for it. The practical effects are varied and thoroughly entertaining, especially during the final psychic duel between Cameron and Ironside's Darryl Revok.

The explanation for how 'scanning' works is kind of like a quantum entanglement of two nervous systems, which is pretty cool. Dr. Ruth describes it as "the direct linking of two nervous systems separated by space." He also describes scanning in a bunch of deeply purple prose, like "a derangement of the synapses called telepathy" that really only works because he delivers the lines through a luxurious beard and mustache with the affect of a man who has been dipping into the company ketamine.

There are some decent action sequences, although I was oddly distracted by the sheer number of shotguns in this movie. Nearly every gun we see is a shotgun of some kind, and we see a lot of guns. It had to be a deliberate choice, and maybe I'm just missing some context that makes it make sense because I was not alive in 1981 when this came out, but it was conspicuous enough that I was thinking about that instead of what was happening on screen during at least a couple of scenes. During one car chase sequence, a panel van opens up gun ports along the side and issues forth a shotgun broadside like a 17th century pirate ship. It's weird.

Jennifer O'Neill plays Kim Obrist, and does a fine job. She spends most of the runtime being traumatized either by seeing her friends die or being forced to kill people with her mind, remarking at one point "Now I know what it feels like to die." She and her friends were a group of Scanners living outside the control of Dr. Ruth or Darryl Revok, until Cameron crashed into their lives and Revok sent in the shotgun squad.

The computer I mentioned earlier is a charmingly retro 80s mainframe computer, with terminal access. Very much before my time, but instantly familiar from playing the Fallout video games. The description of its magnetic tape reel-to-reel system as a "nervous system" by Dr. Ruth is a bit of a stretch, but the payoff of seeing Cameron do psychic battle with a computer is well worth the effort to suspend disbelief. The beginning of the scene brings to mind the real life 'Phone Phreakers' who could manipulate systems connected to the telephone network with audio recordings and even by whistling specific tones. Those guys basically had real technopathic powers, enabled by the weird way our communications infrastructure was set up. In any case, it's one of the best fight scenes between a man in a phone booth and computer in a building miles away ever put to film, for sure.

There is a kind of corporate espionage subplot that involves the production and distribution of a drug that suppresses Scanners' abilities (with some other effects that we discover later.) That angle creates some parallels to the real world Thalidomide scandal, as well as historical medical experimentation on the public, such as the Tuskeegee experiment, that give the plot some scope, and long-term implications.

The ending is simply fantastic, I won't ruin it by going into detail, but it's a lot of fun. Overall I feel this was a solid 4/5, with excellent practical effects, a moody and melodramatic atmosphere, and a surprisingly complex plot. Enjoyers of techno-thrillers, body horror, and beloved character actor Michael Ironside should definitely check this one out.