What horror movie did you just watch? (Was it any good?)

Movies
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lf you like Lustig and ‘grimy NYC exploitation’, you can also watch Vigilante. As you can tell by the title, it’s not an horror movie, but rather… a vigilante. For the record, Lustig -who is Jake La Motta’s nephew- started his career working as an editor on Death Wish. He stopped directing years ago, and created his own company, Blue Underground, specialized in releases of obscure or forgotten exploitation movies. Their catalogue contains, among others, many gialli. l think it’s worth a look.

Also, since you liked Maniac, l strongly recommend an Austrian movie, Angst (the german word for fear). lt is a very unique, disturbing movie, with a fantastic cinematography. lt left a very strong impression on Gaspard Noe, especially visible in his early movies (Seul contre tous and its monologues, lrreversible, and Enter the Void for the camera work).

l recommend you read about it after watching the movie, or even better, try to find the movie bonuses.

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I guess you could check out The Driller Killer for grimy NYC ambience, Abel Ferrara style

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Is that worth it? I recall hearing even the Joe Bob Briggs saying to skip. But I do love me some scummy NYC…

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Ok I am almost at the end of Scanners 2. I don’t think I ever saw this in its entirety.

Released in 1991 but an 80s movie in every way, it stars a young David Hewlitt (Stargate something or other, among other things) sporting an inarguably 80s do. Its sort of fluffy and slightly permy and. . . listen the 80s were amazing but there was some shit there that didn’t work and a lot of the shit that didn’t work was hair for sure ok? these things happen.

Scanners is a sloppy, sometimes uneven movie. It’s not remotely Cronenberg’s best. But its sort of weird, has some cool ideas, and it’s briskly paced. Scanners 2, as a followup, doesn’t really do much to build on a mediocre foundation and and while it isn’t long the pacing isn’t good here. The acting isn’t very good, and while there are some good ideas for effect sequences they’re not as well executed as Scanners’ were.

David - Kellem, the character played by David Hewlitt, so I guess that was either convenient or weird - is a dude. . . going to vet school? I wasn’t 100% clear on this part. But she shows up late for a surgery, and later meets a cutie he is clearly interested in while she tends to a sick puppy in a lab. It’s got encephalitis or something which is really bad ordinarily (at least I’m aware of variants that are) so I assume it’s bad here. Not to worry dog lovers, David scans the puppers and heals it. This is going to get weird in a minute. Then he flirts with the girl - Alice Leonardo, played by an actress named Isabelle Mejias -and she agrees to go on a date with im.

Oh wait I skipped the opening. Our pending BBEG scanner - played by Raoul Max Trujillo - appears to be a vagrant (classic Scanners opening) who wanders into an arcade (RIP; I miss them so much), steals a quarter from a dude, and then proceeds to start rocking Iron Wolf. Not content to beat the game, he scans it (established in first movie! You can scan computers) and is clearly on the way to what is likely a world record until he starts to lose control of his scan (also established), and then everyone freaks out, and a bunch of shit explodes, and cops run him down but a particular cop tranqs him. He is delivered to a lab overseen by some dude played by a sorta C-list character guy named Tom Butler. At the lab there is an attempt to reason with him but he’s like fuck it imma scan all you motherfuckers so they dose him. There’s an argument between cop dude and Dr dude about how the scanners quickly get addicted to the shot and while it allows control, it ruins them beyond the short term. “I need a natural specimen”. Hey, we’ve got one!

I want to talk about the date between David - the character, played by the actor David mind - and Alice. Well, there’s basically a couple of different dates. They’re clearly getting along. But they go out and end up at a club where. . . I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this before. There’s a dude rocking his Cassio keyboard or whatever. But you can’t hear it, which I found odd at first. The music is being broadcast into a closed channel. So you have to get headphones from someone at the bar and put them on. I don’t., . .is this a thing people ever did? It’s so weird. I get that live music can be too loud but. . . it’s appears this place is being depicted as a club of some sort so. . . you know. I just can’t stop being weirded out by this. Anyway David has a really bad “fuck scanner downside” headache incident and has to leave. So to make it up to her, he comes over the next night for dinner. With the puppers.

Now, the gal is some sort of student at the vet school and appears to like animals. But. . .based on her undrstanding of events (1) this is a puppy that was going to be put down soon and (2) just because she likes animals doesn’t mean she wants a fucking dog? You don’t just randomly bring a human being an animal as a present. So basically at this point the least weird thing in the movie is people fucking scanning. I just find this all so bizzare in a totally non-cronenbergian way. I may have the date events out of order - the puppy might be before the club - because I’m so weirded out by how things proceeded. And we haven’t gotten to the weirdest part yet.

And we devolve from there. David and Alice happen to be in a store after a date - maybe it’s after the club - and there’s a robbery and David puts the kibosh on that via scanning. He kills the guy, but the guy was trying to shotgun murder Alice (or maybe it was the pistol guy, whatever), so totally justified. But this gets him on the “lab’s” radar. Dr Doctor and Cop man want David bad. And get him, but you catch more flies with honey. I don’t recall a mention of Consec except maybe once and I don’t think this lab is connected. Anyway they recruit David but manage to bring him into the fold peacefully. And so we get the following sequence of events.

David gets better at scanning via some “training” at the lab. Like basically an hour of doing some scanning, and he gains like +20 levels. He meats BBEG and of course they have a friendly rivalry, by which I mean David is otherwise a nice, well adjusted guy and BBEG is a full sociopath being overacted and obviously hankering to eat babies and getting all up in David’s grill.

Cop man takes BBEG on a field trip. They go visit the current chief of police. And. . . well they kill him obviously. But like. . . BBEG draws the dude into what appears to be an attic. He then taunts him and stuff. And then scans him through a ?window? onto a ?floor outside a window? that still appears to be ?inside the room that looked a little like an attic? but fuck I don’t know. There was a lot of glass breaking and some window frames breaking ok? This sequence is nonsensical. Also, the old chief of police is apparently dead. For falling on the floor through some glass.

David visits Alice in the hospital, where she is because she got pretty roughed up in the robbery. She’s got visible cuts and shit (broken glass and debris because the robbers liked shooting shit, also I think she fell through some stuff). He confesses to her about his powers and she’s like “lol whatev”. So he decides a demonstration is in order. How do you demonstrate your powers? Force her to do something harmless? Read thoughts? Lol you’re all a bunch of casuals.

David scans her and starts to bring her to climax.

Let’s recap. You almost died while getting roughed up in a stressful situation. You spent the night in a hospital (this is established). You haven’t showered in awhile. Emotionally you have seen better days. Are your immediate desires (1) a shower or (2) a righteous cheeseburger and fries or (3) sexxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

But fuck it, she’s sort of into it. A nurse wanders in (scannus interruptus), David scans her the fuck right back out of the room. And we cut to morning. David and Alice are clearly naked under the sheet in a ?double hospital bed? Fuck who cares. Remember the scene in the Chevy Chase movie where he gets powers and does this? That is a sentence you never ever expected to be attached to a derivative of a Cronenberg film, I bet.

Cop man shows up with terrible news - someone murdered the chief of police, lol who could have seen that coming - and David is convinced to go with Cop man to the mayor’s announcement of a new chief of police (glad they got that settled so quickly) and scan her to make her appoint Cop man as the new chief. Because, look, we need some law and fucking order around here someone murdered the old chief of police (who kept the crime off the streets, but deep in his heart, we all knew he felt differently, we all knew he was an anarchist). David is very reluctant but ultimately does it, and the Mayor’s announcement shocks everyone but David and Cop man. This includes the dude standing on stage clearly waiting to be named Chief of Police (sorry bro). Cop man is prone to monologuing and wants to create a New Order (our official sub title) where he controls scanners who control undesirable elements. I mean there’s supposed to be other people involved like Dr Doctor, but the ring only knows one master, you know? Cop man is going to be the head honcho and basically has to take time out of every scene to entertain his delusions of grandeur.

David is increasingly guilt ridden over, you know, invading the Mayor’s mind and forcing her to put the creepy Cop man in charge. He eventually gets into a confrontation over it and flees, but he scans the shit out of Cop man and gets a bunch of important information (the new order, everything about the drug, secret scanner army which is just like a couple of dudes btw). He then flees back to the one place he can feel safe. His parents’ house.

No, it’s not Cameron and Kim from the first movie, they aren’t his parents. J/k they are, but they are dead and David was adopted by a kindly couple. Dad gives David some advice, I think we stablished that Cop man killed Cameron. David leaves to go take a nice long walk, BBEG and some other rando cop show up and murder the adoptive parents. But just mom, Dad is still breathing and David shows back up and is like “fuck, I healed a dog, how hard can this be”. Well, too hard. But Dad lasts long enough to make sure David understands that there is another. A. . . sister, played by the aforementioned Deborah Raffin. He now knows that she’s just chilling in a cabin in the woods and they can combine their powers and go beat BBEG. Which they do, getting a couple of new scanner powers on the way after lingering in the cabin for a bit for no reason.

There are a couple of noteworthy effects sequences in the finale, although they aren’t that good. David, using remote viewing on rando cop dude who helped BBEG kill his parents, remote scans Dr Doctor to force him to throw himself on a holder of a bunch of syringes containing the control drug. Yes, they’re all sitting needle up because this is a world where the hero is going to try and figure out the most inopportune time to force an orgasm on someone with no hands. So I’m like “wow, those are big needles, he’s going to impale the dudes’ face on them how gross”. But either David is a wuss or Dr Doctor manages to resist just enough to belly flop on them. Which, ouch. But then he gets up laughing and, uh, starts changing? I don’t even remember how he died. But I don’t really understand this part. They established that people who were addicted to the drug had to keep taking it and it did eventually physically ruin them (but not kill them). Julie - David’s sister - lost a dude to it or so she thought but he was still in the lab it turned out, and kind of looked like shit. But like Dr Doctor goes way beyond that, like deformed. Maybe David scanned him some more. Because they make it seem like it’s months and months of shots every few days (at the most infrequent) to get to that point. Not 18 shots. So this doesn’t pan out.

David, and Julie, and all the sick/addicted scanners who are suddenly sort of happy because David and Julie show up and are nice to them, drop the mad fat scanner bomb on BBEG after BBEG starts beating David 1v1. This sort of gross but the effects aren’t great so it’s not as good as the Revok/Vale fight in the first movie (and the effects in Scanners aren’t great to begin with).

Then David goes to a Cop Man presser where Cop Man is trying to set David up as an escaped mental patient, only to discover the reporters have new information man and they’re all angrily questioning cop man about his bullshit. . . and drops a pretty big scan on the dude but elects not to kill him. He sort of leaves his head deformed and fucked up though so I’m not sure how merciful it can be considered.

Anyway, Scanners are outed to the world (an important plot point for the third) and then David goes for a nice long walk with Alice. Because the 2nd generation Vale family is fucked up as shit, Julie remote views through him to see how shit is going (they do this thing where david’s eyes get all weird when she looks through him, but different than the eye effects used when they scan through other people). And david smiles because, hey, they;re going pretty good. Alice is cool and she’s hot and maybe sis wants to remote scan her to climax through David? j/k they don’t do that but David’s grin suggests that maybe it’s about to happen.

Fin.

Mostly this is sort of pointless. It might be said that Scanners is more interesting ideas than interesting movie. This doesn’t meaningfully build on those ideas, though. And it lacks Cronenberg’s touch to bring out anything interesting. And who fucking goes to visit someone in the hospital and is like “yo free orgasm” (note, they had made out a couple of times at this point and the relationship is obviously heading in that direction, but yikes).

Still, it’s exciting to get through this so I can watch Scanners III again. Another Scanners movie which will fail to accomplish anything of note.

But first, a detour.

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guysguysguys Dance of the Dwarfs is the movie I thought maybe I hallucinated. It’s real. Also, it’s very bad.

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Modern Problems! I love that movie.

https://gfycat.com/longsinfulamericancreamdraft

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I loved that movie as a kid! Haven’t seen it in decades though… Does it hold up?

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Dancer of the Dwarfs - so this movie must have made it to HBO sometime in 84, maybe. I, at 10 or 11, was in my parent’s bedroom (one of two TVs in the house, but the only one with HBO. And, although not just yet I think) and this came on. Dad was in there as well. I remembered the opening - mostly - and being ordered to shut my eyes and then dad changed the channel. And then I spent a long time wondering iof it was real because I couldn’t remember what it was called. Dancer of something or toher, maybe. There was a stretch where every few years I would say “maybe it was called Dancer in the Dark” and then remember that the latter was the Bjork movie. I sort of gave up on this, because who doesn’t hallucinate horror movies.

The opening is sort of memorable I guess? It’s a cheaply filmed movie, but some dude who is a prisoner (he’s wearing orange) is fleeing dudes on horseback vaguely dressed like cops/army people in a sort of South American way. We’re in a jungle. He comes on an especially dense wall of foliage and sort of crosses himself and prays and looks back and decides that whatever is in there, he can’t go back to prison and in he goes. The Cops arrive, say that “the jungle will have him now, we go back!”, and turn around and leave. One dude’s horse falls down twice. But he manages to get out of there. Then we get some footage of this dude running fearfully through the jungle, I mean the scary jungle, for a bit. The music is clearly intended to convey that this shit is dangerous, yo. This I mostly remembered.

We then cut to a plane flying and landing. This I had forgotten. As one does.

Then we cut back to the jungle. More footage of our prisoner running, scared, despondent. He stops to drink from a pool Suddenly or stream or something (yo, I do not think that’s a thing you casually do in the jungle), and seems to have a sort of “I am so royally fucked” realization. But thyen he suddenly looks startled as if he has heard or sensed something. He begins peering through a dense piece of foliage, but at first sees nothing. Suddenly a clawed hand appears and rips off half his face and he screams. This I also remembered, rather vividly. The special effects are. not. good. But it’s still sort of gross, and hence why Dad was like “shut that shit down young Peacedog”. We’re 4 or so minutes in, so hey at least wse got shit going down.

I am sitting at the 71 minute mark. In the time between that dude gettting eaten and now, the following things have happened:

  1. A very fucking grungy and “it kinda feels like he’s high” Peter Fonda has shown up as our male lead. He and Deborah Raffin - our female - do a lot of bantering. It’s all very inspid.

  2. Fonda at one point introduces us to his local witch doctor friend. He’s. . . yes he’s carrying snakes and shit and also appears to be eating a large hunk of. . . meat? He;s standing off in the distance I can’t tell. And I can’t tell who that is. . .

  3. They are shot down by. . . IDK.

  4. One night in a different walled village the gates get rattled ominously and Raffin is like “wow those gtates are being rattled and nobody is answering my calls guess I’ll just fucking open them” and some villager is like “step the fuck off crazy woman” and we hear a legend about some fucking dwarfs and shit and all the natives are super scared of them.

  5. 20 or 30 minutes of I don’t even know what. It’s eventually established Raffin is looking for a colleague and hopes to study a lost tribe and everyone is like “uh, dude, there’s a tribe of demons I mean dwarfs no maybe it is demons out there eating people just leave”.

  6. At some point we get brief footage of a clawed hand just sort of hanging out. . . somewhere? In the jungle?

  7. Raffin goes looking for her friend and Fonda lets her go alone but came up with more guns and bullets and a radio.

9.Raffin seems like she’s on walkabout for a bit and then the witch doctor shows up and wait a fucking minute is that. . .yes. . . it’s John. Fucking. Amos. I guess Beastmaster hadn’t fully launched his film career yet.

Where as all the other natives speak in some sort of accent and appear to be generically “south american”, John Amos just looks like a black dude except h’;s got random shit painted on him because, you know, witch doctor. Or shaman, or whatever he is. And he basically sounds like Cleo McDowell from Coming to America (“They have the golden Arches, we have the golden arcs!”).

Oh then I think he gave Raffin something because she gets high as a fucking kite and eventually there’s a protracted radio conversaion between her and Fonda. There are <18 minutes left.

So this is supposed to be like a classic pulp adventure (King Solomon’s Mines anyone?), I guess. Or even Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But it’s so bland when it’s not actively bad. I think Raffin at this point has decided the lost tribe is real, but everyone misunderstands them. We’re apparently going to find out that, nope, they’re fucking eating people and shit and Fonda will go rescue here and I’ll get to see some bad rubber suits and who gives a shit. I mean I will finish watching. But man, there is nothing to recommend here. But it’s not enjoyably bad. It makes Scanners 2 look memorable. Except that opening sequence, which clearly burned itself into my brain.

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You’re my hero @peacedog. Keep on keepin’ on.

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You should write movie summaries for Wikipedia.

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I haven’t either, actually. Looks like it can be rented on Amazon for $3.99, maybe I’ll check it out again one of these days.

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Can’t be worse than Nothing But Trouble, right…?

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Well. I guess if you’re going to be an otherwise forgettable movie you should have a memorable ending?
For some values of memorable.

When last we spoke, our heroes were separated by some unknolwn amount of (jungle It’s worth noting Raffin set out on a horse) and were talking over a Radio. It’s not, and it’s raining, and suddenly something strange appears. Yes, it’s a dude in a rubber suit.

This sequence is not good. Frequently the creatures are shot in, IDK, slow motion or something? Somewhat hilariously, there’s a long conversation between Raffin and Fonda over radio where Raffin is frequently speaking LOUDLY and Fonda is whispering into his radio but you guys know the lizard dude is over on her end right? No? Ok.

She sets up her camera to remote photograph when she clicks a button and approaches it and then decides that “oh fuck this was a huge mistake” because it looks angry and then walks towards her in sort of slow mo and then she takes a bunch of pictures and then shoots it in the head. And then a bunch more appear and Fonda appears overhead in a helicopter. But, you know, it’s a bunch of dense jungle so there’s no way he can find her but the camera starts going off again which gives away her location. For plot purposes. She actually runs and jumps on a vine over a misty body of water that’s more creek sized than anything and tries to swing across it but doesn’t make it (lol) and just gets stuck there. But Fonda drops a ladder and they return to the walled compound I now realize only had 2 other people in it.

I know that becuase they’re both dead. Fonda and Raffin land and smooch a bit and she goes calling for the two people but nobody responds. Then she comes on the first, and then the second, dead body. Guess the walls couldn’t keep the lizard dudes out forever. So then we get a sequence where Fonda and Raffin are running around battling them. Fonda shoots severa with a flair gun and predictably they sort of catch on fire. Raffin, OTOH, turns out to be a goddamn sharp shooter. When Fonda at one point yells for her to give him the gun she’s at like 7/12 headshots across two pistols. No, give her more bullets she’s amazing. Although 5 of the shots are the same headshot from different angles, so I guess she was cheating a little bit.

This segment doesn’t make a lot of sense. They run around through he compound, back to the helicopter, and take off. It was malfunctioning again, but I guess Fonda fixed it because they’re flying. As they fly off, they negotiate having a few days of really vigorous sex in a nice hotel room when Raffin goes back into the copter cabin I think to get booze (Fonda only likes to fly while tying one on and she’s not receptive to that, as well as the Clap, among other things). Suddenly a scaled arm reaches out and grabs her from, uh, behind a curtain or something (Fonda basically sleeps in this thing) and we freeze fame.

What utter rot.

There are many things working against this film. The opening segment is wildly out of sync with the rest of the movie. It’s not scary to me now (as opposed to as a child), but it’s clearly a tense situation that isn’t helped by the film’s bad soundtrack. But there’s never really this tension again in the movie. Certainly not when the gate is being rattled. Not really when Raffin is out in the jungle (no creature ever gets close to her). And the significant (if badly done) gore in the opening part is never repeated.

In between these segments is a very badly done Romancing the Stone/et al. The movie is tonally inconsistent and the soundtrack makes it all worse. And the ending is. . . just phoned in.

Still, I basically leveled up by completely watching this thing, The Nameless One style. It’s always fun to discover a “lost” piece of media from your childhood, no matter the quality of that media.

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CHUD has Daniel Stern in it, that automatically makes it a must watch. You could certainly do worse, and it does have that gritty New York feel. I still enjoy it as a guilty pleasure and it is watchable.

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Ghoul Catchers an indie horror comedy I could not finish. Not especially funny or scary or anything.

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We Summon the Darkness (2020) - Alexandra Daddario once again plays a teenager, in this “satanic panic” horror/comedy. It started out really strong then fizzles about halfway in. You know you’re in real trouble when Johnny Knoxville shows up. At least Daddario is easy on the eyes.

Priest (2011) - Not a horror movie at all, but Netflix doesn’t give a shit and stuck this in the category anyway. Paul Bettany stars as a super ninja vampire killing agent of the Church in a world where the vampire apocalypse has reduced humanity to a mix of Judge Dredd cities and the Wild West. There are jet-powered motorcycles, cowboy hats, a locomotive heist, and six-shooters. The vampires are on “reservations” (yuck) that threaten nearby settlements. An expensive and lunk-headed boondoggle with the only fun bits being Karl Urban chewing some scenery. Boring and dumb.

The Evil Within (2017) - Pay dirt! This isn’t a good movie, but it’s got an interesting production story that makes the movie somewhat fascinating as a “what the fuck happened” exercise. Andrew Getty, the Getty Oil Company heir, directed, financed, and wrote this movie from 2002 until his death in 2015, at which point one of the producers finished editing it. Getty also built his own custom camera rigs and on-set practical effects. He did all this while his meth addiction (which ultimately killed him) was rampaging. It’s almost all filmed in one of Getty’s mansions and stars Michael Berryman. The story (such as it is) is based on a series of nightmares that plagued Getty in his childhood, so it’s as disjointed and goofy as that sounds. Not at all recommended as a movie on its own merit. It’s amateurish and frankly nonsensical but there’s a scene with a robot octopus that plays drums and that’s kind of a weird testament to Getty’s artistic vision.

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As someone that dealt with a bed bug infestation at one point I used to think of this movie and how a remake but around bed bugs instead of the super rat could really work, with the slow dissent into madness from lack of sleep etc. I guess Bug 2006 sort of touches on some of this but Of Unknown Origin was what I kept thinking of as I contemplated just burning down the house.

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Oh man that suuuuuuuuuucks. I definitely think someone could take the basic idea of OUO - and surely Bug is a (much superior) cousin - because there’s so much potential social commentary. You could pick a different vermin too.

441

Thumbs up for C.H.U.D.! Much better than I had expected.

442

Night of the Lone Wolf - this is a slightly off kilter Werewolf story. The cast is pretty interesting - Ethan Embry, Tom Noonan, Al Sapienza, Larry Fessenden, and the Last Starfighter himself Lance Guest join Nick Damici (who has had parts in a bunch of lesser things and also wrote Stakeland and I believe the sequel) in this one. The effects are a little uneven although there is a fun transformation sequence at one point in the film.

Damici - a blind veteran - has moved to a new community (his son - Embry - helps) and on the first night his neighbor is killed. His dog also buys it. The “killer” actually comes at him but flees. Combined with a strange find in his house from earlier in the day - gashes in a wall, and something a sighted person identifies as “some kind of claw” - he gets suspicious. There’s no laughs here, but the setup is played not unlike Buffy/Lost Boys. There’s been an unusual number of killings in this remote village. People openly make werewolf jokes on a couple of occasions. The cops don’t seem into that but think there’s something dangerous about the place, enough to warn Damici to “not wander off alone, stay away from the woods, don’t go out at night”. Anyway in the aftermath of the terrible attack he hears something about the moon and decides, yep, it must be a fucking werewolf.

So the rest of his movie is a somewhat stilted investigation into who might be the culprit. the script isn’t great (. . . by any stretch). The werewolf “roar” is very familiar to me, not quite Wilhelm level but it’s something I know I’ve heard many times (and doesn’t work as a werewolf cry/roar at all; this isn’t the only recognizable stock sound either, including one weird instance where a gunshot is followed by a famous “arrow striking a target” sound). This one is very budget. Even though it’s a bit underdone, Damici’s troubled relationship with his son works well enough and his performance is good enough to at least keep me watching. The 3* rating on Amazon is right, maybe even generous, but I’m not at all sorry I watched.