Box Art Review #5 - Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Box Art Review #5

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Directed by Stephen Chiodo

Starring Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon, Michael Siegel, Peter Licassi

The Movie

One of the big trends in 80s horror movies was spoofing/homaging/ripping off the plots of cheesy ‘50s B-movies like The Blob. Generally, the plot breaks down as follows: Troublemaking teens witness aliens, they try to tell the cops, cops tell them to fuck off and quit being troublemakers, teens try to warn the town people, people get all murdered and dead, eventually the cops get their heads outta their asses and team up with the troublemaking teens to take down the aliens. There’s a handful of 80s movies that follow this set up and real talk: I’ll probably be reviewing those eventually in which case I’ll call back to this review and then it’ll be like an inside joke just for you and me <3.

Basically the real reason to see this movie is the effects work. The clowns are all well-designed and straddle that line between creepy and cute like the shirts at Hot Topic, and some of the kills are really creative and fun. I personally find the shadow puppet eating people to be particularly creepy because how the hell does that even work? Lemme throw in a clip of what I’m talking about in case you haven’t seen it so you can know why I’m baffled.

Anyway, it’s a surprisingly decent movie given the concept. I know it has a cult following, but really doesn’t anything with clowns tend to garner a cult following? Everybody from Krusty the Klown, to the Joker, to John Wayne Gacey, to the fucking Insane Clown Posse all have sects of devoted followers. The movie doesn’t amount to much more than the title, but it is a fun watch and definitely the kind of movie you’d find lingering in the corner of the rental place’s horror aisle back in the day, just waiting to be rented by impressionable children (which is probably why it enjoys a cult status to this day).

The Cover

This cover is an abomination. I mean, really, as a guy who’s looking for crazy, ridiculous, schlocky horror movie box art, this is a huge letdown, especially given the title of the film. I mean, the tag line is dumb as hell, the font is awful and looks like it belongs on the side of a fastfood bag, and the cover image is just the most bland image they could’ve used to represent the movie. There’s a lot you can do to represent the title Killer Klowns from Outer Space, in fact, fuck this cover, let’s look at the infinitely better MGM Midnite Movies re-release cover.

Now this is how you get people to watch a movie about killer clowns. I’m still not too crazy about the font – it looks like it’s advertising a bowling alley – but this is miles ahead of that other bullcrap. We’re looking at a painted version of the same clown from the other cover, rendered here as a far more menacing presence looming from outer space with hungry eyes that seem to be actively ignoring the abundance of free popcorn raining down from the heavens. Then there’s the absolutely ridiculous tagline, “IN SPACE NO ONE CAN EAT ICE CREAM!” First of all, is that even true? I can’t specifically remember reading about anybody ever eating ice cream in space, but I also can’t imagine why that wouldn’t be a possibility. Then again, I’m also not the smartest guy reviewing horror movies, and maybe there are some kinda outer space physics laws that state eating ice cream as off limits. Either way, it’s a nice little homage to Alien that’s somehow equal parts dumb and clever at the same time.

This is the kind of cover that would’ve stopped me in the video store. This is the kind of cover that, if nothing else, makes you take the movie off the shelf just to make sure you’re actually seeing what you think you think you’re seeing.

Movie: 4/5

Cover: 1/5 & 3/5

Killer Klowns From Outer Space [Blu-ray]

Criterion Horror Reviews

Criterion Horror Reviews

So for President’s Day weekend 2013 Hulu is allowing free access to their entire collection of Criterion Collection films. There’s a lot of great stuff in there obviously, and I figured I’d use this opportunity to check out some highbrow classics I’ve been meaning to check off my list.

House (Hausu) 3/5

It’s no secret that Japan has an affinity for the bizarre. A lot of the kitschy appeal of Japanese pop culture comes from the weirdness factor, especially when said weirdness is presented without explanation; just look at Super Mario, so much about that series is just completely random nonsense and yet it’s a household name all over the world. House is a movie made in Japan in 1977, and while America loves weird Japanese movies nowadays, that probably wasn’t so much the case back in ’77, so it only just got a stateside release in recent years. Honestly, I think they should have given it a shot, 1977 being the year that punk music flourished and all, I think a lot of subculturalists would have got a kick out of it.

So basically, 7 Japanese schoolgirls with nicknames based on their attributes head out to one girl’s Grandma’s house for the summer. This chick’s grandma lost her husband in World War 2 and ever since then her MO has been to use her psychic cat to possess household objects to kill unwed girls and absorb their energy. But really it’s just a haunted house movie. I can’t think of another film to compare it to really, it’s like equal parts The Haunting, Evil Dead 2, Suspiria, and Scooby Doo. The movie is obviously supposed to be making a statement on Japanese youth at the time or something like that, but even with the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent reading manga and watching anime I can’t exactly tell you what that message is, but I get the feeling that 20^th Century Boys author/artist Naoki Urasawa probably enjoys this movie.

They really went nuts with the effects in this one, trying just about every trick in the book up to that pre-cgi point. There’s a lot of bad blue screen effects and animation that seems to be drawn directly onto the film. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Some of the cooler stuff you get to see include a piano eating a girl, a girl being sucked into a light fixture, a floating head biting another girl on the ass, and a crazy looking fuzzy gas station portrait of a cat named Blanche that spews blood into the house until the living room is flooded and the last girl floats around on a broken door and falls asleep in the arms of a girl in a traditional Japanese wedding gown with the top pulled down to expose her boobs.

The film is bugfuck batshit crazy, but it’s also really, really, slow at times. You would think it would be an easy recommendation, but there are scenes in this movie where you watch girls talk to each other while saccharine music plays in the background for 30 minutes at a time. I’d say if you like weird movies check it out, if you want something more straightforward definitely don’t bother with this.

Man Bites Dog 4/5

Man Bites Dog is a French mockumentary from 1992 that makes a great companion piece to American Psycho. Like American Psycho or Funny Games, it’s one of those movies that are violent and shocking specifically to make you, the viewer, question whether you might have an obsession with violence in film. I’ve never been a fan of this style of filmmaking, it’s a sick kind of entrapment really, to make a violent film and then turn around and say that the viewer is the one with the problem. That being said, it is a good movie, but I think some pacing issues make it fall just short of being a great movie. It’s not quite as preachy as Funny Games, but never gets as exciting as American Psycho, but it does retain the dry black humor of those two films and really builds on its own atmosphere to create a unique movie.

Right from the start, you can tell we’re watching events play out in a fantasy world. No real world film crew would follow around a legit literal serial killer, though I’m guessing that’s meant to be a shot at the media (specifically American media) and their absolute devotion to sensationalism since the Vietnam war. To further distance this film’s reality from our own, it’s shot entirely in black and white, giving it a dreamlike quality in certain scenes, and at times it borders on Lynchian territory. In a late scene the film’s star (protagonist? Antagonist?) unapologetically shoots a dinner guest to “try out” a gun holster he receives as a birthday gift from the film crew. There is no aftermath, only a quiet discomfort and then more gifts to be unwrapped. Man Bites Dog and American Psycho clearly share the same consequence-free world.

The big point everybody focuses on with this movie is the film crew, and for good reason. At the start of the film, the crew maintains a fly-on-the-wall distance where they film the action without reactions. Eventually, one of the crew is shot and killed; afterwards, another crew member writes it off as an “occupational hazard.” After the death of the first crew member, the rest of them are not only dedicated to filming as much as they possibly can, but they actually go on to help with the murders and eventually a murder/rape in the apartment of an unfortunate young couple. You could almost call it a reverse Stockholm syndrome.

As you’d expect, the film never really goes into exactly why the killer needs to kill, instead you get scenes that show off his sociopathic tendencies and his eerily close relationship with his parents. Personally, I think the point is supposed to be that his character is as blank as possible, the shock comes not from his murders but from the way the film crew interacts with him. It’s definitely worth checking out, but I can see why its early cult status sort of wore off over the years, whereas American Psycho still captures everyone’s imagination so many years down the road. Then again, I can’t help but wonder if maybe the French approach to filmmaking is just too foreign for my tastes at this point. I’ve seen a number of foreign films in my time, and generally after a few movies you get a hang of what their audiences like and expect from a movie; my experience with French cinema is admittedly minimal so maybe I just didn’t “get it.”

Box Art Review #4 - My Bloody Valentine

Box Art Review #4

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Directed by George Mihalka

Starring Paul Kelman, Lori Hallier, Neil Affleck

The Movie

Once you get past the basic household names of the slasher genre – your Freddys, your Jasons, Your Chuckies, your Pinheads, and so on – there are a handful of cult classics that somehow never resonated with the general movie going public as well as the others. This is a class that includes movies like Prom Night, Black Christmas, The Burning, and of course, My Bloody Valentine. Also noteworthy is that most of these B-list slashers got remade in the last few years.

In the great tradition of Holiday themed horror movies My Bloody Valentine sorta kinda loosely revolves around the titular holiday. Really though, it’s a movie about a coal mining killer, but if you take away the Valentine’s Day angle you’re left without the neato title and the clever heart shaped box themed kills. The setup retains a lot of the usual horror movie tropes, you got the small town with a secret past, a big social event threatened by a series of murders, and escaped psychotic mental patient out for revenge. At times the plot borders on parody, especially in some of the early expository dialog and when the guy tells the story of the massacre from 20 years back only to be laughed off by the dumb young locals. Why is it always a year divisible by five anyway? You never hear about a killer who went on a rampage 23 years ago or whatever, although I’m sure the number 13 has been used somewhere along the way. One of the cool things about this movie is whenever somebody gets killed or a body gets discovered the movie switches to this old-timey grindhouse filter with scratchy film and all.

The plot is pretty thin, the reason the movie is worth watching is totally because of the Valentine theme; that and the fact that a pick-axe wielding maniac with a gasmask makes for a pretty unnerving bad guy. I almost wish they had just gone with the mining idea alone. They could’ve made a movie like The Thing where a bunch of guys are working in a mine and one of them is killing people and then they all get trapped down there and paranoia sets in or something. If you’re gonna watch this movie make sure you check out the BluRay because the transfer looks incredible.

The Cover

There are two kinds of covers that I love. One is the Drew Struzan type of Holy shit there’s so much to look at cover and the other is the subtle minimalistic imagery as seen on the VHS cover for My Bloody Valentine.
Even though there’s not much going on in this image, it really spells out everything you need to know. I mean, you got a gasmask and a mining helmet front and center, so you know for sure what the killer looks like at least, then there’s some party goers reflected in the lamp on the dudes head, that and the film’s title fill in the rest of what’s going on. Honestly though, that based title had me at hello. In fact, it’s worth mentioning that Irish shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine take their band name form this film’s title (their new album’s great by the way). As a guy who loves horror movie fonts though, I gotta say there’s not much to praise here, the title sequence in the film is much cooler with its two bloody hearts merging to form the Os in Bloody. On top of that, showing the killer's face through the mask was a mistake, the blank expression portrayed by the black lenses on the gasmask gives the killer a mysterious pseudo-supernatural appearance and the way they did it on this cover really crapped all over that idea.

Movie: 3/5

Cover: 3/5

My Bloody Valentine (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Box Art Review #3 - Army of Darkness

Box Art Review # 3
Army of Darkness (1992)
Directed by Sam Raimi
Starring Bruce Campbell

The Movie

Army of Darkness is a slapstick comedy, action, adventure, horror, spoof about a guy who travels back in time with a shotgun, a car, and a chainsaw attached to his wrist to fight ancient demons that killed his girlfriend. It’s pretty great, and if you’re reading this you’ve probably seen it. If you haven’t, you should really get on that, man.

Basically Bruce Campbell ramps up the goofy slapstick from Evil Dead 2 to full blast in this one, so much so, that it’s only really loosely kind of tangentially linked to the horror genre on a technicality. I mean, there are some great creature effects, but no gore and literally none of the atmosphere of either of the first two films. What we do get though, are some truly classic one liners, witty dialog, and a lot of homages to classic fantasy and science fiction movies. I gotta say though, while I love this movie, all the three stooges bits don’t do much for me; I’ve never seen the appeal and still don’t.  

Probably the most classic scene of the film is the finale (where the line “Hail to the King, baby” comes from) but I didn’t always know that. The first time I saw the movie (like, from start to finish) I saw the European ending which is cool in its own right, but much darker and less entertaining; Stick with the one that’s classic. Speaking of foreign markets, the alternate title outside of the U.S. was The Medieval Dead which is just fucking rad as hell.

The Cover

First of all, it’s gotta be said that Darkman is criminally underrated. Second, I honestly think they could’ve hooked more fish with the byline From the Director of Evil Dead. Like Evil Dead 2, that font choice is killer. The tagline, “Trapped in time. Surrounded by Evil. Low on gas.” is brilliant and it sets the tone of the film up before you even pop the movie into the VCR. The cover painting is a clear homage to the fantasy stylings of Frank Frazetta and is an identical silhouette of the posters for Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and National Lampoon’s Vacation. From afar, it looks pretty basic, and then you realize he’s wielding a chainsaw, standing on a tire, and being attacked by miniature versions of himself with a fork. Oh yeah, and there’s a really badass looking skeleton warrior giving the whole scene a stern look of disapproval down there in the bottom right corner.

Like Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness has one of the most iconic posters/VHS box art in the horror game, but more importantly, it’s teamed up with a movie that actually delivers everything that’s on the cover.

Movie: 5/5
Cover: 5/5

Army of Darkness (Screwhead Edition) [Blu-ray]