Box Art Review #8 - Leprechaun

Box Art Review #8

Leprechaun (1993)

Directed by Mark Jones

Starring Warwick Davis and Jennifer Aniston

Lemme start this by getting the oft-repeated ancillary trivia out of the way: This movie stars the Ewok from Return of the Jedi, and Rachel from Friends. Also Francis from Pee-wee’s big adventure, but no one ever feels the need to bring that up.

The Movie

In the glamorous world of slasher movie icons, Leprechaun is less famous than Freddie and Jason, and less prestigious than Pinhead and Leatherface. I’d say he lands somewhere near Chucky and the Puppet Master movies; it’s not really scary, it’s pretty fucking goofy, and it survives to this day on gimmicks and novelty value. It’s pure camp. The dialogue in this movie is unacceptably bad: “Listen bud, k, this is the 90s, women are treated equal.” Is it just me, or were people in the 90s saying “This is the 90s” all the time? Character motivations are just as bad. I mean, for fucks sake, Aniston decides to hang around because of the good looking boy next door, even though mere minutes before meeting him she was dying to leave. Her character in this movie is so fucking dumb that she honestly thinks a dude would crawl under a car and lay in the dirt just to stroke her leg playfully. No doubt a dude might crawl under a car to look up some chick’s skirt or something, but if you felt something rubbing against your leg from beneath a car wouldn’t your first guess be that it was a cat? Clearly no one is watching this movie for the writing and expert character development, which is good, because in many ways this shit is as legendarily lame as Troll 2.

Let’s be real here, the only reason anyone’s watching Leprechaun is because it’s about a fucking Leprechaun. Now, I’ve got a little bit of Irish in me, but I don’t know jackshit about leprechaun lore. Even so, I find it weird that this titular leprechaun eats bugs, has the ability to mimic voices, and for some reason has a fear of four leaf clovers. I’m with the AVGN on this one; I’d think the leprechaun would be down with four leaf clovers, not vulnerable to powers. And then there’s the part where the leprechaun’s riding around on a tricycle. I can’t explain why, but this irked me for some reason; it’s almost like they’re implying all little people ride around on tricycles or something. I dunno, maybe it’s just me.

The leprechaun never quite reaches the inherit creepiness of Chucky, but I will admit that being bounced on to death with a pogo stick seems legitimately painful. Other than that, his killing methods are pretty tame. He snaps a guy’s neck, and the guy who started the whole is killed off screen. That’s it. The movie has three deaths, one of which was lame and completely unnecessary, and another we don’t even get to see. Hell, he spends more time shining shoes than killing people. Slasher villains like Jason, Leatherface, and Michael Myers aren’t known for over the top and outlandish kill scenes, but they have whole mythologies to make them interesting. All the leprechaun has going for him is the fact that makeup is pretty effective.

Honestly, this movie is a real dud, I can’t recommend it. My guess is that some of the later sequels are probably hilarious and maybe worth checking out (In space? Back 2 tha Hood?), but don’t waste your time with this.

The Cover

As far as I can tell, they just recycled the poster art here. To be fair, I can remember picking this movie and its sequels up off the shelf at the video rental place multiple times. There’s something fascinating about childish folklore being turned into menacing killers, hence the existence of horror movies about Santa Clause, Uncle Sam, and Jack Frost. The cover does a good job of selling the idea, but I think it does too good of a job. Looking at this cover, your mind runs wild imagining all of the shenanigans this movie must contain. Then you watch the movie and it’s nothing but disappointment. The tagline, “Your luck just ran out,” is clever enough, but again, the movie never delivers on that promise. The font is pretty bad too. The whole thing is just really mediocre, much like the movie itself.

I’m sure this movie has its fans, and I’m still interested in checking out the near infinite number of sequels just for camp value, but it’s just not for me.

Movie 1/5

Cover 2/5

Leprechaun / Leprechaun 2 / Leprechaun 3 / Leprechaun 4: In Space (4-Film Collection)

Box Art Review #7 - Prison

Box Art Review #7

Prison (1988 )

Directed by  Renny Harlin

Starring  Viggo Mortensen

I’m honestly surprised this movie isn’t more well known. It’s got Viggo Mortensen, which you would think would be enough to sell DVDs in the five dollar bin at Wal-Mart, and it’s a horror movie set in a prison, which is a flawless idea that somehow hasn’t been exhausted yet. The director, Renny Harlin, went on to direct the 4^th Nightmare on Elm Street – one of the lesser offerings in my opinion – as well as Die Hard 2 – again, one of the lesser sequels – and the major box office failure, Cutthroat Island, the stupid-but-fun Deep Blue Sea, and The Long Kiss Good Night, which I’ve never seen, but my dad use to watch on HBO all the time.

The movie is a slow burn for sure; you could almost throw it in with From Dusk ‘til Dawn, as it starts off as one movie before it’s derailed by a major tonal shift and becomes a horror flick. The film opens with a wide selection of prisoners with varying degrees of likability, and right away you notice that the writing is this movie’s strong point. Likewise, the movie excels on the acting front too; Viggo Mortensen checks in with a Clint Eastwood style Man From Nowhere performance and is just impossibly cool (even while cupping another man’s balls), Chelsea Field is great and, most importantly, believable, as the naïve youngster who’s just trying to do what’s right, and best of all is Lane Smith who totally kills it as the prison’s warden who always seems to be in control of the situation. I can’t say much for the director’s other work, but this movie is so good that it almost feels like a John Carpenter film.

The plot really starts to kick into gear when the prisoners start to get attacked by a glowing blue light that microwaves a guy to death after melting his shoes. Viggo saves another guy from the same melting fate and becomes sort of a hero to other inmates. Then another guy tries to escape and gets all tangled an’ mangled in a knot of steel tubes, wire, and rebar; the reveal of his mutilated body is pretty cool as he falls from the ceiling and lands on the table where prisoners are chowing down. The power goes out, and in one really creative scene, a TV, a radio, and a fax machine all start to go haywire playing commercials and songs from 1964 and printing out a fax with 1964 repeated over and over a la The Shining.

Prison is certainly an overlooked gem for horror fans, but casual movie-goers probably aren’t missing much. It’s a little too long, and it would have been a million times better if the main prisoner characters were given a chance to grow, but the worst problem is the ending. You get all this buildup, a lot of it seemingly pointing to Viggo’s character as the reincarnation of this wrongly executed guy from ’64, and then the power goes out and the prisoners are rioting and trying to escape while all this unexplained supernatural shit is going down and then nothing really happens. Seriously, this movie had some great momentum building and then nothing really comes of it. You do get to see the zombie version of the executed prisoner strapped to an electric chair with newly granted lightning powers zap the shit out of the warden before he can escape, which is admittedly pretty rad, but I think they really missed an opportunity here. I’m just throwing this out there, but here’s how I would’ve ended the movie: Once the power goes out and the prisoners start rioting, make the ghost/zombie possess Viggo and give him lightning powers and super strength and just start going apeshit on all the prisoners. So he’s killing people right and left and everybody’s trying to hide in their cells and whatever, while the girl, the warden, and some other prisoners search for the ghost/zombies body. The ghost/zombie reawakens at the sight of the warden and goes in for the kill, but just before he can kill the girl and the prisoners, Viggo comes up from behind and electrocutes him (back) to death and the two of them die (or re-die).

The Cover

This cover rules. I can imagine a lot of people got suckered into renting this based on the box art and then were disappointed when it turned out to be a supernatural thriller instead of a gory slasher. Everything about it is cool, that Goonies looking school up top with iron bars in its eyes, the guy strapped into the electric chair, even the tagline is suitably ominous. The best part though, is the font; it looks like a cheesy 80s black metal band, like the kind that would wear corpse paint and take photos of themselves in the woods or next to burning churches. I really don’t have a whole lot to say on this one, there’s really nothing to criticize, it’s just a cool horror movie cover, the kind that got me interested in blogging about them in the first place. This is the kind of box art I would have grabbed off the shelf and stared at when I was a kid, trying to imagine the movie in my mind and all the gruesome ways people would die, it’s just too bad that the movie doesn’t live up to the cover.

Movie:3/5

Cover: 5/5

Scream Factory just released Prison in Febrauary on Blu Ray making it available for the first time since VHS

Prison (Collector's Edition) [Blu-ray/DVD Combo]

Box Art Review #6 - Society

Box Art Review #6

Society (1992 )

Directed by  Brian Yuzna

Starring  Billy Warlock and Devin DeVasquez

First things first, can I just point out that homie’s name is Billy Warlock. Holy moly, that’s the coolest name since Max Power.

The Movie

Body horror is my second favorite horror genre, right after horror comedies. Unfortunately, it’s a genre with relatively few entries, most of those entries are by the same guy, and it’s pretty much dead in recent years. There was a short boom of gross out body horror flicks in the 80s, most of the movies people remember, like The Fly, Scanners, The Brood, and Videodrome, were done by the master, David Cronenberg. Some other “classics” include the Blob remake, From Beyond, and I guess you could include movies like Alien, American Werewolf, and The Thing where fucked up shit happens to people’s bodies, but I dunno if I’d outright classify those as body horror. For a film to fit the body horror moniker, you basically have to have character’s who’s bodies undergo some kind of horrifying transfiguration (you could even technically throw in Kafka’s Metamorphosis if you really wanted to), usually said transfiguration involves a lot of goopy, slimy guts or random shit growing out of people’s extremities, or some kind of neato vfx riff on decomposing bodies.

Society premiered in 1989 at Cannes, but didn’t get an official American release till ’92, which should further prove the fact that body horror (as horror fans identify it) was a short-lived 80s fad. The director, Brian Yuzna’s Wikipedia page is a laundry list of mediocre to semi-decent horror sequels that includes entries to the Re-Animator and Return of the Living Dead series; Society almost doesn’t fit with the rest of his repertoire with its political themes and artistic integrity. Basically, a rich kid from Beverly Hills can’t shake the feeling that he doesn’t quite belong with his friends and family and then eventually finds out that that’s because they’re all horrifying monsters. Basically, all the rich people are an entirely different species from human beings, and they have this annual feeding/orgy called “shunting” where they sort of melt into one big weird monster and feed off the poor. Honestly, you could remake this movie right now with 99%er themes and it would win awards probably.

The Cover

This cover is almost great. I mean, I feel like they didn’t really commit to the idea. In a perfect world, this cover would just be the girl, and the face being pulled off would have a lot more strands and sick gooey shit coming off of it. Also, the face beneath needs to be horrifying, not just another face. I really like the font actually, but as it is now, you could easily mistake this as some kind of erotic thriller. They really don’t need both of those taglines either, You are what they eat is perfect really, the other one is just overkill, and sort of adds to that erotic thriller misconception possibility. Maybe the problem is the title, in context it fits like a glove, but the way it’s executed here is a real bummer. I like the font, (one of) the taglines, and the face removal idea in theory, but when they’re all put together in this way it’s really just a missed opportunity.

I also feel it’s necessary to point out that the Tartan (presumably British) DVD cover features a screenshot where a dude’s head is inside of a comically oversized asshole, though I don’t think anyone would guess that without having first seen the movie. You can totally check out what I’m talking about here.

Movie: 4/5

Cover: 2/5

Society