Box Art Review #11 - Nightmares

 

 

Box Art Review #11

Nightmares (1983)

Directed by Joseph Sargent

Starring Emilio Estevez, Lance Henriksen, Veronica Cartwright

I seriously love horror anthologies. From TV series like Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt, Masters of Horror, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, Night Visions, Fact or Fiction: Beyond Belief, Dark Room, (and even kids’ shows like Are you Afraid of the Dark, Goosebumps, Eerie Indiana, The Haunting Hour, etc) to movies like Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, Tales from the Darkside (the movie), Body Bags, and Quicksilver Highway to name a lot. So I’m always surprised and excited when I find one I haven’t seen yet, especially if it’s from the 80s, like Nightmares. What really sold me, aside from Emilio Estevez of course, was the eerie trailer and poster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOncLexWDE

Unfortunately, as with most anthology films, it’s only about half good, so I’m just gonna talk about the parts that are worth seeing.

Emilio Estevez plays a teenager who’s obsessed with arcade games and has to battle a game villain in real life. It’s kind of like that episode of Are you Afraid of the Dark where the kid gets sucked into the pinball game. As far as scares go, it’s pretty lame, but if you’re a fan of unintentional humor and ironic cool factors, this shit is pure 80s cheese and it’s rad as hell. First of all, the segment has a soundtrack with a pretty respectable punk lineup that includes FEAR and Black Flag. Plus 80s Latino gangbangers, terrible 80s fashion choices, and laughable 80s vector graphics on the haunted(?) arcade game. Maybe it’s just me, but Emilio Estevez is just fun to watch in everything he does.

The very next segment is the best in the film. Lance Henriksen plays a priest who quits his priesting duties after a crisis of faith only to be attacked by a mysterious black truck on a desert blacktop. This segment is totally Stephen King territory; the man writes about killer cars fairly often with Christine being the prime example, and a disillusioned priest is a major character in his shared universe dealie. It borrows strengthening elements from other road horror movies like Duel and The Hitcher too. The best part of the whole movie (spoiler alert) is when the truck just fucking explodes out of the ground after pulling a Tremors move tunneling under the ground Bugs Bunny style. It surprised the fuck out of me. I love this whole segment, it’s just perfect, and the best part is that Henriksen plays it so straight and dedicated as if this were a serious Oscar-bait drama.

Even though the other two segements aren’t anything special, all four stories boast excellent acting and tense atmosphere. Definitely check this out if you’re into anthologies.

The Cover

The Nightmares box art is sort of a rarity in that what’s on the cover is actually in the movie.

Check this trailer out where they reproduce the effect on the cover (or maybe it’s vice versa).

Just wanna say, that dude’s voiceover rules; he’s already got the deep, guttural creeper voice, but then they add on some kind of voice effect that makes it sound like he’s talking to you from another dimension that exists entirely under murky black water. Yeah. It rules.

So anyway, the cover, you got your vast desert wasteland lit by a neon purple light somehow which is cool, and those eyes are spooky, sure, but those hands are what really sell it. The speedlines around the fingers and the distance between the hands and the eyes allude that this nightmare creature is reaching across the vast wasteland to fuck your shit up. It’s really cool, it’s really simple, and it’s a really clever way of marketing the idea of a nightmare. Also, you gotta love the parallel between the cracks on the ground and the lightening in the sky.

Really though, the best part about the whole package is the tagline. I love how the title is centered (well, mostly) and then beneath it the ellipses implies that you were just reading the beginning of a sentence up there. …Is this year’s sleeper. is kinda presumptuous, especially given the film’s relative obscurity even in horror circles, but it’s also a great pun .

The Movie:4/5 (Mostly for Emilio)

The Cover:4/5

 

 

Box Art Review #10 - One Dark Night

Box Art Review #10

One Dark Night (1983)

Directed by Tom McLoughlin

Starring Meg Tilly, E.G. Daily, Adam West

You know what rules about this movie? Fucking Adam West is in it.

I first heard about One Dark Night from the documentary Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (check it out on Netflix) and I was immediately sold by the footage of skeletal corpses rising from the grave while dumb teens were locked in a mausoleum.

Right away, One Dark Night seems to be a culmination of several other, more successful, horror films. The setting seems to borrow from Phantasm, the telekinesis element is reminiscent of Carrie and Scanners, and maybe it’s just me but the incredibly eerie film score sounds like it was lifted wholesale from Creepshow. I fucking love the score; it’s the same style of dreary synth music used in Creepshow (as previously mentioned) and Tales from the Darkside. Another element in One Dark Night that seems to pop up in a lot of pre-90s horror films is the Charles Manson style cult leader. I wasn’t around for all that, but at times it seems like the Manson family was that generation’s Columbine, like people were genuinely afraid that shit was gonna happen again and again, so much so that it became sort of stock plotline.

So the main chick in this wants nothing more than to belong to a group of girls who call themselves The Sisters and wear pink jackets with that shit embroidered on the back. This is just unspeakably retarded. Maybe if there were a whole bunch of girls who were running around with these jackets I’d buy this premise, but it’s just these three (only three!) really bitchy broads, and who cares what three people think? Even her boyfriend thinks they’re jerks and can’t understand why she needs to be a part of their group so bad. These “Sisters” bitches drop her off at a mausoleum and give her drugs (y’know, just in case she can’t sleep) and she actually fucking takes them, even after everybody in the movie keeps reminding her of how terrible these girls are.

Unfortunately, One Dark Night never quite lives up to its premise. The problem with this movie is that nothing scary happens ‘til the last half hour, and then all hell breaks loose and it’s pretty awesome. Caskets slide out of their wall drawer things and pop open to reveal bodies with oozing faces and skin that won’t stay on, it’s really great. It never reaches the gore levels of Scanners or the sheer insanity of Phantasm though, and without the final scenes it’s really just the same old stupid crap you always see in bad teen horror movies.  They wasted a lot of potential here, they could’ve had a memorable villain on their hands, but he’s got no lines and almost no backstory, like we’re just supposed to believe he’s pretty scary.

The Cover

No, no, no, this is all wrong man. First of all, look at that bullshit font choice. You gotta have some real balls to try and pull that off. The tagline couldn’t be more generic, “A shocking tale of horror that takes you beyond fear” tells you nothing at all about the actual plot of the movie and was clearly written by some bored ad copy guy. Worst of all, there’s no pun. Here are some way better taglines I just farted out: “They’re dying to get out!” “The only way out of the mausoleum is…DEATH!” “Will they live to see morning?!” “The dead are awake…and dead!” “Julie wanted to belong…instead she got ZOMBIES!!!”

The most tragic part of this mess is that you really got squint it up to even see them corpses. This picture might have actually been pretty effective if it was more vivid.

Let’s look instead at the British box art which showcases a decent illustration of mummified hands reaching up suggestively up a white girl’s dress while the mausoleum chills in the background next to some spindly leafless trees. Still, even here, that font is utter garbage (worse than the US font) and that tagline is equally lame. 

The Movie: 2/5

The Cover: 1/5

Box Art Review #9 - Popcorn

Box Art Review #9

Popcorn (1991)

Directed by Mark Herrier

Starring  Jill Schoelen, Dee Wallace

The Movie

Popcorn is a weird movie. Let me explain: a lot of horror movies are weird, I mean Freddy Krueger is weird as hell when you analyze the elements of his backstory/costume piece by piece, and most of John Carpenter’s output was ridiculously weird (except The Ward, which is just benign bullshit that should’ve been credited to Alan Smithee).

Reasons Popcorn is weird

1. The movie seems to have been made by people who have never seen a movie before. It has the same quality as a first novel written by a bored housewife who’s never written more than a grocery list before but suddenly decides she wants to be a writer. I mean, the dialog is corny in most cases, and when it’s not corny it sounds nothing like the way real people talk. Weirdly enough, there’s a short discussion early on where some film students discuss the sorry state of the late 80s/early 90s film industry and the works of Ingmar Bergman.

2. A bunch of shit just happens. You could say this about any movie, but Popcorn is different. It opens up with some bizarre experimental film footage, like something a college kid would make and then deem brilliant and then goes on to show even more weird footage of a cult leader/film director babbling about nothing. Then, it’s like, “hey let’s throw in a subplot about a guy who led a cult and movies and then killed his family live on stage, that’ll really spice up the charity movie festival.” What? Seriously, what?

3. The main chick’s mom is getting these phone calls from the guy in the weird videos and ends up at the movie theater with a gun where she sees his weird movie again and seems to know what’s up with the whole cult business. At this point, the film’s villain seems to be supernatural in origin, what with the crazy bullshit he pulls off. But no, not really.

4. Then there’s these film students who decide to put on a film festival with bad 50s B movies that use 4D gimmicks and we’re treated to a laughable montage with the worst reggae song about going to the movies that I’ve ever heard. Then, when the marathon happens there’s a bunch of people with crazy costumes and these two dudes are randomly rapping about monster movies or something. Then there’s a lame reggae band that shows up halfway through the marathon to inexplicably play music while the kids try to get the power back on. “But wait,” I asked aloud, “how are they playing music without electricity? They’re singing into a microphone for crying out loud!”

So those reasons are anything but concise, but the point is, this movie seems to exist outside of your typical Hollywood slasher fare (and yet it never quite goes into Lynchian territory). These might sound like complaints, but holy shit, this movie rules. Somehow all this weird crap just make the movie even better. It’s like this, these guys could’ve made a movie just about a slasher at a B movie marathon, but they went the extra mile and threw in all this weird shit about a cult leader and his experimental films and it’s ten times better for it.

Some of the best things about this movie: The villain is batshit crazy and looks awesome, the soundtrack is so stupid it’s awesome, the experimental films are awesome, the fake B movie footage is awesome, all the dumb comments from the audience during the B movies are awesome. The main character is played by Jill Schoelen who was in Babes in Toyland (along with Drew Barrymore, Keanu Reeves, and Pat Morita) which is a movie I remember we had on VHS, but I don’t remember ever watching it. The only black person is this movie is played by the chick with the incredibly annoying voice from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child (apparently she was in Lost Boys and People Under the Stairs too, but I don’t remember her in them). Lastly, I’m pretty sure the Disney channel original movie Phantom of the Megaplex is an intentional ripoff of this movie and I remember liking that movie a lot too.

This movie is special. This is the kind of un-ironic fun slasher/horror that would never get made today because no one would take it seriously; where else are you gonna see a guy get pissed on by his own doppelganger and then die in a toilet bowl explosion?

The Cover

This is one of those rare occasions where the movie and the VHS cover are equally awesome. This cover/poster has everything I love, a skeleton, a ridiculous tagline, a killer, pointy font, and a glowing green haze surrounding everything. This cover is actually pretty similar to the cover for Society, except here they did it right. This is the kind of VHS cover I love, because this is the kind of movie I would’ve grabbed off the shelf in a heartbeat back in the heady days of video rental stores.

Movie: 5/5

Cover: 5/5

Evil Dead (2013)

Evil Dead (2013)

Directed by Fede Alvarez

            There was a moment at the Wondercon Evil Dead panel wherein one of the lead actresses (I honestly couldn’t tell you which, neither of them made much of an impression, though Lou Taylor Pucci seems like a genuinely cool guy) was explaining how intense the filming process was and describing an admittedly impressive scene where she’s buried alive with a bag over her face. In the middle of explaining how difficult and exhausting it was to shoot this scene, Bruce Campbel laughed in her general direction and destroyed any credibility she may have had for everyone in the enormous arena. This was my biggest concern with remaking Evil Dead in the first place; the original film was basically a special effects showcase. The fact that the leading man had an undeniable charisma and the ability to give every take his absolute best to the point of nearly destroying his own body is merely a happy coincidence. The remake is actually pretty decent, but without a strong lead, it’s kind of just there. It doesn’t really fail necessarily, but it’s so close to being an exceptional film that it’s ultimately disappointing to anyone who imagined a gamechanger like I did.

            The film’s biggest problem - and I never thought I’d say this about any movie ever - is that the story gets in the way of the action. It’s Evil Dead guys, it’s okay to choose style over substance. The story that’s forced on us is an interesting jumping off point, the main character is trying to kick a drug habit and so any kind of spooky shenanigans she encounters are definitely gonna be written off by her pals as either hallucinations or excuses made in an attempt to flee the scene. The problem though, is that they focus on this story for way too damn long, and in doing so they destroy any shits the audience might give about her by making her out to be a horrible junkie bitch who guilt trips her friends and family because of her own bullshit life choices. Whatever. I can deal with all that. It just takes too fucking long for the shit to hit the fan, never a good way to start a horror movie. Although ironically, the very beginning starts off with an intense scene and kicks the movie off with a literal bang.

            As far as the gore, expect this to be the major selling point from the films proponents. They’re right though, it’s impressive, and to quote another Wondercon panel moment, director Fede Alvarez told the audience that he said “I don’t even wanna hear the word CGI on my set,” which is an impressive goal these days. The movie is shot with all (or almost all) practical effects, and it shows that an object that’s really there with the actors during filming makes for much better interaction and thus a much better overall film experience. When they remade The Thing (again, I should add) it was so fucking horrible because of the unrealistic CGI. All that being said, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, while each gore scene goes the extra mile to be as crazy as possible, you’re ultimately never surprised by anything you see.

            The characters in this movie are constantly making the dumbest, most clichéd choices imaginable. Going down in the basement, falling for some demon trickery (she’s dead bro, it’s not really your sister anymore), and so on. I swear, everyone in the theater was constantly groaning and pointing out how stupid the characters were for falling for such common clichés.

            My final complaint is that Jane Levy’s character Mia is never quite given the screen time needed to pull of the last 20 minutes of the film where she becomes the hero. I loved when it was just her vs. the demon, I loved the final chainsaw kill, but I feel like it’s hard to care about a character who went from being an insufferable bitch to being a badly jonesing druggie to being a possessed demon chick to being dead to being a newly reborn hero. In all that mess, her character is only likeable for a very short time. Not to mention (again), she’s no Bruce. And then there’s the ending. Just as Mia really gets going, starts fighting back and becoming all badass, the movie just ends. There’s no POV demon chase scene or dimension hopping or any of that cool shit, so it’s a little disappointing.

            If I seem like I’m waffling on my opinion here, well, I’m not quite sure how to feel about this movie. Ultimately, if it had to be remade (and trust me, it was gonna happen eventually) then I’m glad we got a decent movie instead of some studio abomination. Alvarez and crew are to be praised for their oldschool DIY work ethic, but maybe Diablo Cody should’ve stayed the fuck away from the script. Maybe they should’ve casted an actress with more pizazz. Maybe they should’ve given Mia more to do. Maybe they should’ve written a better ending. Maybe they should’ve left the franchise alone.

It’s a copout, but I give Evil Dead (2013) a perfectly symmetrical 2.5/5