No Good Very Bad Movies 16: The one with Harry Potter

 

Title: Troll

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Mashup

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

As I write this, it’s closing on half a year since I started this feature, and I’m really much further along than I thought I would be. A major reason for this is that quite a few movies featured up here would otherwise have ended up elsewhere, especially under Featured Creature and my animation reviews. Often, these decisions have been spur of the moment judgment calls. With the present review, I am coming to something different, a movie that’s been on my radar a long time which I went through a lot of further debate about. What settled its place here was its quite unusual history and status, as a movie at once notorious and relatively overlooked, all because of developments completely beyond the control of those who made it. I present Troll, the movie that Troll 2 was supposed to be a sequel to, which somehow ended up overshadowed by it, and as a bonus, it does indeed have a kid named Harry Potter.

Our story begins with a family called the Potters moving into an apartment building otherwise populated entirely by annoying sitcom side characters. As they are unpacking, another new arrival appears, a strange humanoid creature who promptly takes the place of their daughter Wendy. The big brother, named Harry Jr, is immediately suspicious at his sister’s increasingly rambunctious and precocious behavior, but no one else notices anything amiss. Meanwhile, the supernatural being quickly picks off the apartment denizens, apparently transforming them into woodland fay folk of his own sylvan dimension. It all gets a convenient backstory when Junior meets up with a spunky matron who reveals herself to be an enchantress and the villain’s old flame. She reveals that the entity is a great warlock transformed into a troll, in punishment for his dastardly scheme to wipe out the human race and replace them with fairies. Now, the troll needs only to transform the last of the tenants to bring the fairy world to Earth. It’s up to the kid to save his sister and the world, or the building is truly going green!

Troll was a 1986 horror/ urban fantasy film from Empire Pictures and producers Charles and Albert Band. The movie became the directorial debut of special effects creator John Carl Buechler, following a credit for one segment of Empire’s Dungeonmaster the previous year. The film starred veteran character/ B-movie actor Michael Moriarty as Harry Potter and Noah Hathaway of The Neverending Story as Junior, with June Lockhart as the witch Eunice and Philip Fondacaro in a duel role as the troll and professor Michael Mallory. The supporting cast included Sonny Bono and Julia Louis Dreyfuss as apartment dwellers and Anne Lockhart as a stand-in for her real-life mother as the de-aged Eunice in the finale. Effects for the film were created mainly with practical/ animatronic puppets and some stop-motion and optical effects; it notably did not feature the Band crew’s chronic offender David Allen. The movie received mixed to negative reviews on release, with many criticizing its mix of horror and fantasy elements, but still grossed $5.5 million against a budget of up to $1.1M. The film received further notoriety due to the release of an unrelated film as Troll 2 in 1990, without the knowledge or consent of the makers of either film. The film is available for streaming from Amazon.

For my experiences, I’m sure I first heard of this one in connection with Troll 2. What quickly struck me was how rarely reviewers that film ever discussed this one at any length. Considering the infamy of the non-sequel, one might expect a collateral notoriety, if not backhanded praise just to emphasize how bad the other was. Instead, it slipped so far into the shadow of Troll 2 that it was for a long stretch difficult to obtain except as an add-on with that film. The only other film I had encountered with this kind of negative space was “Trek 1”, with the obvious difference that the sequel which overshadowed it was actually good. I finally got motivated to investigate when I acquired Dungeonmaster, along with the mess that was Creepers. After I reviewed that film, I finally requested the 2-pack from Netflix, and it was genuinely up in the air which one I was going to review. I never regretted my choice, but I knew I had unfinished business. Ultimately, I returned to it several times before I was ready for this review, because it is weird.

The first and obvious point to make about this movie is that it has nothing like the issues of Troll 2 or Creepers. At the same time, it’s not hard to see why it never rose to the status of a “cult classic”. For fans of the Band crew in particular, it’s difficult to take as anything but a disappointment. This shows especially in the effects, which is all the more baffling as I’m entirely satisfied that several of the creature puppets were flat-out recycled from Dungeonmaster, which certainly did better in this among other areas. The obvious explanation is the familiar problem of letting an effects guy run the show, which in this case can be said to get better if you look at other films the director did. What remains even more puzzling is that it does on a certain level bear out its unmemorable reputation, which shouldn’t be the case by any object standard. This is easily among the most surreal entries in an era of strange experiments, as evidenced especially by the transformation effects (not to mention the musical numbers…). The best explanation I can suggest is that it’s just polished and “mainstream” enough to create a misleading sense of familiarity. That, in turn, brings in the prominent debate whether it either ripped off or was ripped off by certain other properties, a question I find no more interesting than its similarities to other Band crew efforts.

Meanwhile, what I find most noteworthy about the film is its nearly on-the-nose treatment of urban fantasy. In these terms, it is definitely forward-thinking (compare with The Gate a year later), but it also shows many of the potential drawbacks of the genre. The ultramundane apartment dwellers furnish a few good moments, like an early interaction between Bono’s character and a lady friend (“…Unfortunately…”), but there are many more that feel as trite and dated as a sitcom. The premise is further stretched by the lack of genuinely likeable characters, with Moriarty’s father figure being perhaps the most nuanced (and the source of easily the best lines). These issues further divert from the simple fact that the fantasy elements of the story remain quite routine. After all the strangeness of the effects, it comes down to a story of a kid who can conveniently beat the competent adults with information and artifacts that are literally handed to him. (That brings up an idea I’ve kicked around for a satire where all the fantasy-land denizens really just humor the human child adventurers to keep them out of any actual danger.) It’s a good enough story, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before and since. For that matter, it’s the type of fantasy that would usually be aimed at younger audiences than the  movie’s PG13 rating indicates.

That leaves the “one scene”, and there’s one that has stood out to me from early on. In the middle act, a friendship begins between the troll in its child guise and the midget professor Mallory. In their longest one-on-one interaction, the child persona starts with pleasantries and an accepted offer of juice. She innocently muses, “You seem at peace with the world around you,” then asks about the professor’s health. When he responds with more pleasantries, she says, “You’re fibbing.” He quickly admits that he is terminally ill, doing his best to explain in a child’s terms. There’s signs of empathy and deeper thoughtfulness as the troll responds, seemingly vexed by the questions of mortality. He then shares a further memory of learning of his dwarfism, finally remarking, “I kept on waiting.” It’s a genuinely poignant scene, not quite in character for the film yet not entirely wasted, and a further setup for one of the most effective creature shots soon after.

In closing, I come as I often have to why I am covering this movie here. It definitely didn’t fit in with Space 1979, even less so than Troll 2 did. I gave it more though for Featured Creature or its spinoff (see The Dark Crystal), but very quickly decided it simply wasn’t up to the quality of the movies I was covering there (yes, including Mimic 2 and Starship Troopers 3). That left this feature, and I freely admit I still had mixed feelings about it. For the rating in particular, it got what it has virtually by default, except not in the sense I have used it for maligned or controversial films like Saturn 3 and Frozen. Again, it’s not nearly as bad as Troll 2, let alone Creepers, but then, nobody ever said it was. The one thing it didn’t deserve reputation-wise was to be overlooked, especially in comparison with the “sequels”. Even then, the final verdict is that there are clear and understandable reasons it was forgotten, which would probably have been even more complete without the infamy of the subsequent film. I stand up for it as a film worth watching despite its flaws. And with that, I have one more loose end out of the way.

Fiction: The Adventures of Sidekick Carl, Part 18!

 It's the end of the month, and I decided it was a matter of self-respect to do an installment of Sidekick Carl. No intro this time, just links for first and previous installments.

The Toxo Warriors sat together in their lab. The TV showed a short clip of a damaged convention center. “Authorities have still not confirmed the identity of the individual or individuals responsible for the attack,” the announcer said. “However, sources say that a single attacker was taken into custody at the scene…”

The TV turned off. “Well, we know she failed,” said the one who had most of the plans. “We don’t know if she’s alive.”

“She could talk,” the second said. “She might have already. She know enough.”

The first shook his head. “She wouldn’t,” he said. “There’s nothing they can do to her that would matter. She never really cared about what we were doing.”

The second nodded. “Do we really want to finish?” he said.

“We’ve come too far not to,” said the first.

“That’s what they said,” the second countered.

“Well,” the first said, “at least we can see if it’s finished…”

He opened the door, and they emerged into the larger warehouse space. Before them was an enormous, vaguely serpentine metal form, colored blue-green, with wheels on its four feet. It was clear that it was missing only the head. The second one reluctantly removed a tarp from the mechanical dragon head. Now it, too, was a pristine sea green, without a hint of the corrosion and encrustations that had covered it. Its mouth flickered as it spoke but one word: “Excellent.” And the two Toxo Warriors looked nervously at each other.

* * *

 

Dana Shelton turned a laptop around to show the pictures of two men with dark hair. “These are… were… John Turner and Ian Chesterton. They were second cousins, or that was on record. There were rumors that they might have been half-brothers, but nobody would say who said so. Turner had a doctorate in chemistry, Ian was a construction and landscaping contractor who tried to get a chemical engineering degree. Turner got hired by some big companies and a couple schools, but never lasted more than a few years. He was married, too; his wife divorced him a year before the Toxo Warriors first appeared. I’m still working on what happened to her. She filed for a restraining order right before the divorce was finalized, then things go dark. She had a child, from a previous relationship. There’s a trail there, I just need time to run it down.”

Even through the camera, her gaze focused pointedly on Agent John Carter. He shrugged. “All right, we knew about them,” he said. “We put them on a list of persons of interest. It was a long list. We found the wife, too, once. She didn’t know anything.”

Carl nodded, though he frowned, and turned back to his partner’s daughter. “I’m sure you can tell us more,” he said. “What about the other one?”

“We have less on him,” she said. “He owned his own company, but he never made much of an impression, even on his employees. The only people he was close to talked about him differently. They say he was intense, into superhumans, cryptozoology, conspiracies, you know the drill. The big break is, he was a contractor for the companies that owned the properties where the Toxo Warriors operated. He even worked at one of the same sites.”

Carter nodded, and idly clasped his own Dana’s hand. “That was how he got on our radar,” he said. He looked back at Ms. Shelton. “Well, you might as well tell them the rest.”

She smiled. “Sure, so, after the lab blew up, both men completely disappeared. With Turner, nobody was really looking for him, so he wasn’t declared missing until he didn’t turn up for a court date. But Chesterton’s employees and partners were calling police within a few days. Most of them thought he had skipped out on paying them, so a lot of them called their lawyers first. There were a few who talked about whether he was a Toxo Warrior, but nobody really took it seriously. By then, he was supposed to be hundreds of miles from the lab, so there was nothing conclusive to connect him.”

“I know,” Carter said. “It still wasn’t more than we had on other people. So what’s different now?”

Shelton’s smile became a grin. Then, here’s what nobody knew,” she said. “He took a quarter-million dollar loan from one of the Raven’s shell companies. That was after the Toxo Warriors’ lab was built.”

Carl glanced sidelong at Carter. His face was nearly blank, which he knew was a sign of surprise or great concern. The agent glanced back. “No, we didn’t know,” he said. “Sure, that’s not noise level. But can you prove it means anything?”

“How about this?” the other Dana said. “He took out the loan after 3 different accounts the Toxo Warriors used were emptied. And, he had a meeting for the loan while the logs at one of their work sites said he was on the clock. That was why so many people thought he was just going to bail, but none of them knew about the money.”

“Fine,” Carl finally cut in. “We have a connection. But how does it help us now?”

That was when his Dana spoke up. “Well, we already know what  really happened to the Toxo Warriors, don’t we?” she said. “Everyone said they couldn’t have survived, nobody saw these guys again, so the simplest explanation is, they never got out of the lab. That means whoever is out there is another pair. Maybe they were part of the crew, maybe they’re just copying the original. Still, different.”

“Sure,” Carter said. “But I’d say, not different enough. They definitely know things we never released, and none of the copycats we caught before ever figured out. And they aren’t thinking small, either. They may not be building armies like Basiliskus or Dr. Hydro, but they aren’t just out to knock off a bank or a gold train. It might be even bigger than anything the original guys ever thought of. At least I have something to take home.”

Carter left, while Dana stayed on the line to catch up in earnest. The two woman chattered, notwithstanding the deep voice of the Nine Foot Woman. When they were finally done, Carl stepped outside while his wife prepared for bed. He looked back, and forth, and finally up. “Are you ready to talk?” he called out.

 

As he turned again, he saw no surprise at the sight of two shining red eyes already there.

Featured Creature: The one with a deaf girl and aliens

 

Title: A Quiet Place

What Year?: 2018

Category: Anachronistic Outlier

Classification: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

If you’re a reader who’s been with me for a while, you might easily get the impression that I hardly watch anything new. It’s certainly true that when it comes to what I review, it’s a big deal when I watch something that was made in the last 20 years (see Starship Troopers 3). But I do watch new stuff, even it’s heavy on horror movies and cartoons. There was even a time when I actually reviewed quite a few then-contemporary movies that I greatly admire to this day. With this review, I’m finally back to the present, at least by my standards, with a movie I saw in the theater. Here is A Quiet Place, an actually popular movie that people probably expected me to like.

Our story begins with a family on a supply run in an empty town that ends in a completely predictable tragedy. We soon learn that this is a near-future Earth overrun by mysterious predators that hunt by sound. Our survivors’ advantage is that their teenage daughter is deaf, so they all know sign language. On the other hand, they have another kid on the way, and in the meantime, the father is torturing the deaf girl trying to make a hearing aid. As the due date approaches, the creatures seem to close in. When their home is invaded, it’s up to the family to stop surviving and fight back!

A Quiet Place was a 2018 film by John Krasinski, who starred, directed and received cowriter credit. The story and script was reportedly first developed by writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck as college students, then sold to paramount in 2016. The film costarred Krasinski’s real-life spouse Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf/ hearing-impaired. The soundtrack was composed by Marco Beltrami, also known for Hellboy. The film received a general theatrical release in April 2018 following screenings at the South By Southwest festival. It was an immediate success, earning $350 million against a $17M budget. A sequel was released in 2021 after repeated delays. A possible third film is reportedly in development.

For my experiences, I saw this movie with somewhat cautious interest. My immediate impression was that it provides a typical example of a “mainstream” genre film by people who obviously don’t have a deeper grounding that actual fans would. In particular, it presents a collision of several tropes already thoroughly dissected, notably what I call the “tidy apocalypse” (see Night of the Comet). What’s most noteworthy is the idea of beating a monster by hiding from it. My long-standing take on this is that critics tend to miss the point as much as those who uncritically rely on it. To give the most infamous example, if you’re facing a T. rex, freezing in place is not that bad a plan, for reasons that would apply to any carnivore. At least you aren’t actively advertising that you’re slow and weak, or doing anything to provoke or annoy it. The same applies for any other mumbo jumbo; if a predator doesn’t eat you, the simplest explanation is that you didn’t look or act like food. As I pointed out when I mentioned the present movie in my Green Slime review, a “monster” that doesn’t attack can be terrifying in its own right.

With that in mind, the present movie is actually quite interesting. The monsters are very menacing and damn fast, with a deceptively simple design apart from the weird artichoke heads. They make me think of evil Oz characters, with just enough anthropomorphic qualities to fall in Uncanny Valley territory. On further questions of biology and ecology, what the movie really does right is leaving enough honest unknowns that more common and improbable assumptions of the “monster” genre are unneeded. For example, there’s no serious suggestion that they might be invulnerable to firearms, even if takes a problematically long time for anyone to use one. It’s not difficult to apply further realistic limitations. If they are breeding, it can’t be fast enough for hundreds or thousands of young to be underfoot. While they don’t show communication or pack hunting, there are just enough of them that some social behavior is likely.  Most significantly, their posited strength/ weakness of sound has enough unpredictable effects that it can't easily be taken advantage of. At several unnerving points, they attack machines and other clearly non-edible objects for no reason except irritation. Thus, it is clear that defeating them isn’t just a matter of blasting them with the most powerful sound system you can find, though surely somebody would have tried that at some point.

As often happens, the biggest problems rise from the plot and other mundane considerations. The obvious issues, covered in part above, are where the creatures came from, how they got here and why they weren’t eradicated by military force. For the most part, though, these objections fall under the already expansive category of allowable unknowns. As far as we know, the monsters might not be the only cause or even the main one for the civilizational collapse in evidence. For the purposes of the story, we don’t need to know any more than the human characters do, and it’s clear these aren’t the types who would know that much. What’s far less forgivable is the unnecessary plot contrivances and predictable “mainstream” emotional manipulation. The defining tragedy, considered in cold blood, would probably happen in some form even if the family all followed their own rules to the letter. The resulting guilt and implied conflicts come down in less flattering lights to standard teen angst and self-hatred, while the self-sacrifice of the finale is a lot harder to stomach when the parental figure is literally directing himself. The bottom line to me is that the film and especially the director overplays an already good hand. Monsters versus farmers doesn’t have to be complicated, and where the film that works, it isn’t. The one thing this didn’t need was extra and obvious melodrama.

That brings me to the “one scene”, and I worked in a whole extra viewing to get to the one that’s always interested me the most. In the final act, the mother and her newborn are left behind in a soundproof room. As she wakes up, she discovers that the room is flooding, for reasons I’ve never quite pieced together but seem unrelated to any of the creatures’ depredations. As she looks around, we see a creature on the far side of the chamber, not really doing anything. It makes a kind of rattling or clicking sound, and partly submerges without clearly advancing. Her eyes then fix on a box in use as an improvised cradle, now evidently floating. There’s a low, repeated note in the background as she opens the box and finds the baby safe inside. Just as she retrieves the baby, the creature’s head breaks the surface. And this is one point where my “head canon” take is that the creature knows exactly where the humans are and probably has the whole time. She withdraws, finally retreating behind a sheet of water, while the creature continues its strange sounds that I say fit with actual echolocation. What happens from here is exactly where the interesting part is not what happens but why. Maybe it’s confused or irritated by the noise. Maybe they dislike water. Maybe they are stressed by confined and/or manmade spaces (which would really explain a lot of things we see). Maybe this was never really about hunting for food at all. Like almost all the better aspects of the film, this is a mystery that doesn’t need an answer, though that’s probably not going to stop the sequels from trying.

In closing, the thought that continues to linger in my mind is whether the “monster movie” genre has gone dormant. A major selling point for this movie in particular was to present itself as a willful throwback, with the implication that its own sources belong in the past rather than the present. By my own assessment, the one real low point for monster movies was the 1970s and perhaps the 1960s before that (see Squirm), and that applied more for the American “mainstream” than for genre films as a whole (see Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster). By comparison, the post-2010 era has at least maintained a steady and varied output. There are remakes and belated sequels, of course, the best by a wide margin being Kong. There are “old school” homages like Pacific Rim. There are movies that more properly belong in other genres while having a “monster” vibe, like Lights Out and Frozen. Then there are certainly those here and there that do their own thing within the genre, like Attack The Block and Crawl. In that company, this film was really middle of the road, definitely “retro” in its underpinnings with plenty that’s genuinely new. In the process, it manages to be decent to good, with just a few flaws bringing it down from what could have been a higher rating. All in all, it’s a good prognosis for the future, and that’s enough for me to call it a night.

Retrobots Revisited: Changeables Gen 2!

 

It's my day off on the last week of an "off" month, and I've been trying to work ahead a bit. For the post today, I have another bot lineup, following up on what seems to have been my last installment of this feature, the McDonalds Changeables. Since that post, I made a couple orders adding to my collection, from later releases I consciously declined to pick up back when. Here's the first pic of the lineup including one we met last time, all based on vintage packaging that's probably being collected on some far-off planet (all that just to reference my review of The Hidden).

Of this lot, the one featured before is the first-wave McNuggets bot. The others are supposed to be a very similar sandwich box marked Quarter Pounder, and a pancake box that obviously isn't disguised from all angles. It's noteworthy that, where both Transformers and its rivals and competitors often took these shortcuts, this is the only Changeable to do so, thus one more reason they're awesome. Here's the group transformed. The McNuggets is cool as always, the flapjack box is silly, but the Quarter Pounder is just... not... right.

Needless to say, it was the sandwich-box bot that got me interested in expanding my collection. What makes him and other "G2" bots different is that there's a lot more detail painted on, which in turn makes it more difficult to find them in good condition. The Quarter Pounder in particular is prone to wear on the outer box detail and the face; the one I finally got is in moderately good condition. On close examination, I found some streaks on the inside that must have worn off during "transformations", and quickly concluded the only good option is to leave him in bot mode. And that face... dear Logos, the face... You can only appreciate it in closeup.

"Have I told you how I got these scars?"

Something I realized as I did further research was that two of my figures, the Fries and the Big Mac, were G2 figures, released with different colors. This incidentally explained why the Fry bot's fists are visible when he's not transformed; originally it was all red anyway. It also accounted for a vague memory of what I took as the original Quarter Pounder on the Happy Meal boxes, as it turned out both originally had the same yellow/ blue colors. Since many of the online offers included duplicates, I looked into getting a G1 figure for comparison. I didn't care for the prices, but I did end up with an extra Big Mac in better condition. I noticed after posting this, there's a further, minor difference in the molding of the lettuce, which is completely gratuitous compared to the expense of multiple molds. Here they are with the G1 Quarter Pounder; even in the pic, I can tell the one on the right is the one I already had.

Something else I confirmed in my research is that I had already sort of had a G2 bot, in the form of a 3rd wave of transforming toys that became dinos instead of bots. Here's a lineup of that one with the Fry and Shake bots. You can see the extra detail on the Fry bot's face, which is solid, deep blue in G1. I also determined that the Shake bot's red/ blue detail is painted on, something I initially thought was unique but then confirmed on the McNuggets bot.

And here's a closeup of the dino.

And last and probably least, here's a couple burger-based Transformers. The first is one I'm sure I held in my hand in the second-hand stores back in the day, which the extra Big Mac bot came with. The other is another dino, clearly based on the Big Mac bot but definitely of separate origin. The Cheeseburger bot has a kind of charm, but definitely doesn't measure up to G1. The dino is just weird.

"I have no mouth, and I must siiiiiing..."

And for something different, here's one that got away. Something I had already confirmed is that the Shake bot was replaced by a completely different design in G2, which was wonky even compared to the flapjack bot. But then I found a listing for this, by a seller in Australia. It looks like a repaint/ upgrade of the G1 bot, except this time, there's clearly a new faceplate. I didn't get it because of the price, including a big hit on shipping, and I haven't seen any independent confirmation of its provenance. For now, it must remain a mystery. And wow, that face...

And to wind things up, a couple reference model pics. First, Connie and Cassie, back on the stand. I got out the purse from the box the Trailer Park Princess came in, and Cass has been rocking it.

"I don't know, maybe I should give King Kong another chance. But what would we have for dinner?..."

And as an extra project I might get back to, I've been testing out the articulation on the Lanard large Alien figures to see if I can get a pose that's actually threatening. This is the best so far...

"Wait a minute, we're robots... but we're disguised as something it can eat???"

That's all for now, more to come!

No Good Very Bad Movies 15: The one with diesel punk zombies

 

Title: Frankenstein’s Army

What Year?: 2013

Classification: Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

In the course of this feature, something I have thought about on and off is working in a zombie movie, a genre I already mined out with The Revenant Review. There’s no question, the lion’s share of the worst movies I’ve ever seen have been zombie movies, and in almost all cases, I avoided them. I had a long list of titles I usually made a point not to mention, including one that would definitely have this spot if I was ready to commit to watching any part of it again. The thing about these movies is that most o them didn’t really take the zombie concept anywhere, and many of them are still entertaining after a fashion. Zombie movies are like pizza, even a ”bad” one can still hit the spot. While investigating further material, I came across one that is genuinely different, with some of the strangest revenants on record and an odd approach to the narrative notwithstanding the fact that it drew directly on one of the most overused and unwelcome trend of the current millennium. I present Frankenstein’s Army, which I happened to watch for this review at 4:30 AM on one of the nights when I know I’m not getting to sleep.

Our story begins with Soviet soldiers advancing into Germany, documented by a largely unseen man with a camera that happens to record in color. After some standard looting and atrocities, they catch wind of a signal from another unit under attack.  As they investigate, they begin discovering strange remains that appear to combine human, animal and machine, which unhelpful locals warn them have been attacking both sides. Soon, they begin encountering the hybrids alive and fully functional. The group is quickly picked off in combat with the lumbering, nearly invulnerable retro-tech cyborgs. To stay alive, they must be as ruthless as their inhuman enemies. But our cameraman is more than he seems, with a mission of his own, and the lair of creator of the horrors still lies ahead!

Frankenstein’s Army was a 2013 film directed by Richard Raaphorst from his own story and concepts. The film was based on an earlier unproduced project titled “Worst Case Scenario”, which would have featured several creature designs used in the finished film. The film was shot in Raaphorst’s homeland of the Czech Republic. The multinational cast included Karel Roden as Dr. Frankenstein, Joshua Sasse as Sergei and Alexander Mercury as the “point of view” character Dmitri, with Romanian Cristina Catalina as the eventually transformed nurse Eva. Extensive effects for the undead, referred to in the credits and publicity material as “zombots”, were created mainly with prosthetics and practical effects by a team that included Lord of the Rings veteran Carola Broekhoff. The film received a limited theatrical release, followed by release on disc and streaming. It received mixed to positive reviews from genre critics and fans, with a number of critics noting problems with its “found footage” setup including the fact that the production far exceeded World War 2-era film equipment. The film is available for free streaming on several platforms.

For my experiences, this is another film I watched on my epic rides to work. It stood out to me as a particularly late example of the found footage genre/ conceit, which I had experienced mainly through Cloverfield and Romero’s Diary of the Dead. My strongest impression of the whole iffy trend is that Romero’s entry offered the only approach that makes it workable and convincing: Everyone involved is supposed to be part of an experienced crew with equipment they know how to use. By comparison, the present film is first and foremost the one that just said to Hell with it all, and I remain ambivalent about the results. It would have been fascinating to have a horror movie that simulated the technology and “look” of actual wartime films. What we get instead makes me suspect that the real inspiration was first-person shooter video games. Given that frame of reference, the film at least follows its own “rules”; The camera angles follow natural lines of sight, the lingering detail shots are fitted into the pauses when nobody is trying to kill the cameraman, and there isn’t even much of the “shaky cam” artifice wrongly taken for realism.  It may not be particularly “good”, yet it’s still not so tiresome as to distract from the events.

And that brings us to the obvious hook, the biomechanoid undead. They aren’t that unique, but they are unquestionably at least as well-done as anything one could compare them to (see Splinter, if anything). The better points come from the simple fact that you can generally figure out what they’re made from, as well as the fact that the camerawork doesn’t willfully obscure them. The overall look is that of body horror twisted all the way into pure abstract art, with enough examples that this could easily become a nearly endless list. It’s admittedly problematic to take them as a threat. We see literally first-hand that they are surprisingly stealthy and almost impossible to kill, but their biggest real advantage is the confined, ambush-friendly environment. The counterpoint is that there is clearly a law of averages in effect, with some clearly less successful creations and others that don’t appear intended to fight at all. The latter are easily among the most unsettling, especially the eerie “character zombie” nurse, who seems to hum as she does her work. The most fascinating to me is the “mace” zombie, which reappears several times without ever doing more than crawl along. It’s not clear if it’s damaged in battle or outright defective. Still, it does make its way back to the lair, whether to be repaired, upgraded or merely recycled.

The con side here is that the visual horrors far exceed anything we get from the story or characters. Now, this is where critics can be a little unfair. The characters are not likable by any means, to a certain extent perpetuating wartime stereotypes and propaganda, but this is after all a war movie as well as a horror movie. On consideration, they are at least well-defined, usually well-acted, and a lot better developed than they really need to be. The real affront to the sensibilities is their matter-of-fact disposal, culminating in the fate of Sasse’s charismatic character as a guinea pig in an experiment that would give Megavolt serious reservations. (See Wild, Wild Planet while you’re at it.) Where balance drops off is the extremely thin story, to the point I would probably have disqualified it from the Revenant Review (and I cleared The Video Dead!). The journey is no more or less than a guided tour of a meat grinder, with little sign of the deeper allegory and tragedy that a mature anti-war narrative might bring to the table. It doesn’t help that the otherwise chilling villain’s backstory is a mess of contradictions, still less that he has to keep handling the camera himself to continue the found-footage conceit.

Now for the “one scene”, I was inclined to go with the appearance of the nurse, which gets honorable mention. (And what the Hell did they do with her eyes?) The one I decided on, however, was one I might have disregarded if I hadn’t seen it discussed on a page for the movie. As we enter the final act, Dimitri and the camera wander the doctor’s lair alone, into the largest and most ominous chamber. Our point of view approaches a rickety-looking cart in the middle of it all. Only then do we see that one of the bodies is a still-living man. He actually looks into the camera, though it’s never clear if he’s really aware anyone is there. Even more unsettlingly, he begins to laugh. That’s when the figure approaches, and he begins to talk, argue and plead in German, without the benefit of any subtitles (itself a conceit I was making fun of with the “authentic” Serbo-Croatian in my Exotroopers series). He continues to talk as he is pushed to his fate. Just why he bothers is one more thing not at all clear; perhaps he recognizes a former comrade, perhaps he is addressing God or the universe in general. His talking becomes a steady cry, never quite a formulaic scream. It’s very unnerving, yet oddly intimate, and really a fair example of why the movie at least sometimes works.

In closing, I have less to say about the rating than the trend the movie represents. In hindsight, “found footage” as a device had been in use since the 1970s at least, as evidenced by sequences from Dark Star, The Hidden and for that matter Aliens. The obvious difference is that these films all used “first person” segments to supplement more orthodox camerawork and storytelling, which was the most realistic assessment of the strengths and limitations of the concept. As with many unwelcome “trends”, the problems only started when the latest “new wave” filmmakers expanded it from one tool in a toolbox to a central element of their narrative style. Inevitably, for every example that worked on its own terms, there were more that failed and in some cases diminished otherwise worthwhile projects. The present film stands out as one of the ones that didn’t entirely succeed, but went in a different enough direction that it can’t be readily discounted as a failure either. It’s films like this that I had in mind when I started this feature, and for that, it belongs here. With that, I’m done for another day.

No Good Very Bad Movies 14: The one that invented the disaster movie

 

Title: When Worlds Collide

What Year?: 1951

Classification: Prototype

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

In my reflections in the course of my reviews, one recurring theme that has crossed my mind is how much the whole idea of the “worst” movies was based on 1950s cinema. I suppose this is a major reason I have dealt only sparingly with movies from that period. On a deeper level, however, movies from that time simply don’t connect with me nearly as well as I’m sure people would expect. And that is what brought me to the present selection, a film that was a big-budget, near-mainstream offering in its own time, but now more forgotten than many of the notorious B-movies of the time including a few that probably ripped it off. Here is When Worlds Collide, the great-grandfather of disaster movies that ended up more like a cousin twice removed.

Our story begins with a shot of an illuminated Bible verse that looks like a press release from Westboro Baptist. We then get a sequence of astronomers watching the skies with increasing alarm. Soon, they deliver their news to the UN: A  pair of rogue planets have invaded the solar system, one on a collision course with Earth. All the human race can do is build a space ark to colonize the second rogue planet, which might be habitable. Meanwhile, we meet the main and least interesting characters, Joyce, the daughter of a scientist planning the evacuation, her boyfriend Tony, and David, a hotshot pilot that the lady is immediately infatuated with. The scientists manage to begin construction of the ark, with help from a crippled businessman who demands passage as a condition of his support. The rest of the potential colonists are chosen by lottery from a pool that doesn’t seem to include a single person who isn’t attractive and white. As doomsday approaches, humanity must choose between pooling together or tearing itself apart, but the focus remains on the pilot who can’t quite decide whether to die or get the girl and save his skin. Oh, and is there air on that new planet??? They don’t know!!!

When Worlds Collide was a 1951 science fiction drama produced by Hungarian-born George Pal, based on a 1933 novel by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. An adaptation was reportedly first considered by Cecil B. Demille. The film was directed by Rudolph Mate, known for the 1932 horror/ surrealist film Vampyr, and starred Richard Derr and Barbara Rush, with John Hoyt as the businessman Stanton. It represented one the first “big budget” science fiction films, with a pre-inflation budget of  $936,000, roughly equal to The African Queen released the same year.  The film was a potential disappointment at the time of release, earning $1.6 million, though it went on to be an undisputed if controversial classic. Philip Strick notably critiqued its social commentary as “a rather decorous affair”, while praising its effects as “classics of destruction”. Peter Nichols described it less flatteringly as “a likeable, rather silly film”.

For my experiences, this is a film I heard of a long, long time ago, but was very slow to seek out. As already alluded above, my real frame of reference in this review has been why I don’t really “like” 1950s sci fi. Of course, there are films from the decade that are among my all-time favorites, and a few that I absolutely despise. By and large, however, the whole period just leaves me nose-blind. There’s just not enough difference between the supposed classics and the infamous turkeys for me to get invested. I am left especially cold by the ridicule piled on the many entries that were simply and obviously made by people who obviously didn’t know how to make a movie. As a mature viewer and reviewer, I simply invoke Commander Worf, that there is no honor in attacking the weak. Meanwhile, I’ve grown to be vaguely annoyed by the blind eye turned to the flaws of the “classics”, and the extent to which they both accepted and perpetuated the illogical errors and self-dated conceits that held genre films back for years and decades to come. It all drove me to the point of thinking of covering just one representative example, and this one came right to the top, especially after I reviewed its knockoff Warning From Space.

With that out of the way, the most baffling thing about a film like this is just how much must have been unknown for this to make any amount of sense. At face value, these are mitigating circumstances. After all, this was a time when there was still at least an optimistic case for multicellular animal life on Mars and Venus; a body from outside the solar system would have been in literally unknown territory. But there are many more areas where even arm-waving clearly place the movie’s scenario in doubt, to the point that I had this movie specifically in mind when I went easy on Pinocchio In Outer Space. (I wasn’t even aware that many synopses describe a star approaching Earth, which apparently is at least at odds with the original novel.) What you can’t get around is that the “heroes” freely send Earth’s last hope straight to a body that they admit they know nothing about. The final “happy ending”, which I watched in cold blood a month or two before the present review, is so mindbogglingly absurd that I immediately wondered if it was an inspiration for the classic line in Galaxy Quest. This is how you get a mainstream, big-budget film with worse science than a Disney-knockoff cartoon.

All the scientific complaints still don’t get to the heart of what’s good and bad in the movie. On the pro side, it has to be given credit for being honest with its scenario, which is honestly the main thing that stopped me from giving it the lowest rating. There’s no super science or last-ditch daring-do here. Earth is doomed, and the vast majority of humanity are going to go with it. The obvious faults are the total lack of racial diversity (just as well considering what racial stereotypes were like at the time) and the very limited size of the crew. The deeper problem is that Hollywood wasn’t ready to ask or answer the film’s own questions. The fairest thing to be said is that in the years since, the genre has rarely if ever offered an answer that wasn’t set by the artist’s politics. Here, the answer is heroic self-sacrifice and implied Judeo-Christian piety (really handled with more subtlety than Pal’s War of the Worlds). It’s easy to ridicule the Cold War era optimism, especially given how close they were to making their own apocalypse. But then, a generation of  “gritty” post-apocalypses where most of the populace start looting over a few random zombie attacks haven’t done any better at giving a realistic picture or human nature. There are stories that show that people don’t become angels or monsters at the flip of a switch, but they have so far failed to take root in the studio system.

Now, it’s time for the “one scene”. After more melodrama with the lottery, the scientists are absorbed enough in an argument that they take little notice of a distraught man who returns his “winning” number rather than be separated from his beloved, something they could easily have headed off by making the lottery for couples. Then Stanton’s employee and personal servant enters, and seeing the number, declares it his own and draws a gun to reinforce his point. There’s a fine bit of monologuing as he expands on his hatred for his boss and just how happy he would be to see him dead. Naturally, the scientists try to reason with him, seemingly almost oblivious to the situation and his increasingly obvious psychotic streak. Then two shots ring out, and the real surprise is who fired them. It’s one of the better moments keeping the movie afloat, with an extra touch of seemingly calculated anticlimax, and one more reason I can’t quite hate it.

In closing, what I find myself coming back to is whether there has ever been a “worst” decade of movies. What strikes me is that it’s the odd decades that stand out,  and with them, you can trace certain flavors unique to each one. Most of the movies I’ve reviewed that annoy me the most have been from the 1970s (see Silent Running and ZPG), when there was a large infusion of truly stupid films from filmmakers too competent to be excused. By comparison, the 1950s were an all-time low for pure amateurism, at least after the 1930s (see Ingagi) when sound film was new enough that nobody really knew what the Hell they were doing. The really difference is that even “bad” ‘50s movies can rise to the level of amusing and even thoughtful, as I illustrated with my review of Plan 9 From Outer Space. In that context, the present film is perhaps the most fitting example of its time, with some good, some bad, and a lot that’s too dated to stir up strong feelings either way. Take it or leave it, it’s a snapshot of its era. And with that, I’m wrapping this up. We’ll meet again…

The Anthology Anthology: Horror/ sci fi mashup anthologies

 

I decided it was time for something new on this blog, and as usual, that means something I've already done but didn't give its own feature before. This will be a feature dedicated to anthologies, previously covered with my post on the amazingly inappropriate Hitchcock kids' anthology (itself part of a larger collection likely to reappear if this goes on much longer), especially the sci fi, horror and generally messed up ones I knew and sometimes loved from the school and public libraries. For this installment, I have two, part of a somewhat larger set I built up, and they are as interesting as they are not so much good.

For the backstory, the present selections are from a vast series of anthologies by one Helen Hoke, a prolific and apparently otherwise respected author and publisher of children's books. In the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Ms. Hoke took credit for somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 of these things (you can try to count them at ISFDB) under the general description of horror. I remember these things infesting the libraries into the 1990s and 2000s, usually clustered in the kids' section. Like the Crestwood House Monsters series, we never saw these on sale, and once they started disappearing from the library shelves, the difficulty and corresponding price of getting them went up very quickly, though not yet to anywhere near the level of those little orange volumes. It was in one of these that I read "The Ski Lift", a story suspiciously similar to the plot of Frozen (not the Disney movie). We won't be seeing that one this time, but that should tell you all you need to know about how appropriate these are for kids. 

What's noteworthy in hindsight is that these are grab bags even by anthology standards, especially in overall quality. Any given one will predictably include some genuine classics of Victorian/ Gothic fiction, some underrated selections from the mid-century pulps, and a helping of "modern" selections that you would have to harrow Copyright Hell to find anywhere else. Like Weird Tales of old, there is no attempt at genre consistency. There is supernatural horror, science fiction, borderline dark fantasy, and the odd "straight" mystery/ thriller story. In the centerpiece of this post, tastefully titled Creepies, Creepies, Creepies, it happens that no less than six of the twelve selections are within the sci fi category.

The best piece of this anthology, and a good contender for best in my entire set, is "The Dancing Partner", a steampunk-flavored written by Jerome K. Jerome in 1893. The author was best known as a humorist, which puts him in the league of switch hitters like Guy DeMaupassant and W.W Jacobs. It's an intriguing bit of proto sci fi and a grisly early entry in the "killer robot" genre. It's all about a dancing automaton created by an eccentric toymaker as a companion for his daughter and her friends. It proves to be a formidable, very non-anthropomorphic bot with a retrospective steampunk flavor. Things go well at first as a girl named Annette joins the mechanical man on the ballroom floor, and there's enough subtlety that it's never clear how soon or how fast things go wrong. There's just a slow transition from cheerful admiration to unease to horror as the machine dances with the increasingly unresponsive young lady. I reread it for this post, and what most intrigued me was a passage that could sum up both genre conventions and real-time armchair analysis in more recent times: "Those who are not present think how stupid must have been those who were; those who are reflect afterwards how simple it would have been to do this, that or the other, if only they had thought of it at the time."

Other sci fi entries here include William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice In the Night", another Victorian-era tale, a Gernsback-vintage tale "Carlton's Father" by Eric Ambrose about immortality gone awry, and Clifford Simak's atypical invasion story "Skirmish". On the modern end, there's "The Meshes of Doom", scavenged like "The Ski Lift" from the Pan Book of Horror Stories series, a halfway decent killer plant story that cops out as psychological horror. The most curious is "The Animators" by the moderately prolific Sydney Bounds, a straight-up zombie story set on Mars from 1975 that became the basis of The Last Days On Mars. The strange thing is that the modern zombie mythos was notable for emerging straight from low-budget cinema and only much later finding a footing in printed fiction. Yet, this stands as an early outlier, after Night of the Living Dead but still before Dawn of the Dead really solidified the formula. It reads like a comic book short, with a bare minimum of character development and not even that much gore. The most interested element is the almost unlikable protagonist, explicitly the lone military man among scientists who bristle at his strict discipline, exactly the kind of dynamic that wouldn't and couldn't happen on an actual space expedition. By comparison, the undead are almost undescribed apart from the unintimidating Patient Zero, who climbs out of his dusty grave after being stripped of his space suit. For once, the undead prove at least as smart as the opposition, and get the upper hand in time for a predictable unhappy ending.

For the remainder of the stories, the most interesting is a crime piece "The Bitter Years" from Dana Lyon, a crime novelist who wrote mainly in French. It's a concise, polished piece with a little too much emphasis on the ironic ending. I personally would find it more interesting if a murderess left a man moldering with no sign of remorse, as the real kind do quite frequently. Also of interest is "The Natterjack" by Mary Danby, who apparently printed it under her own editing gig for the Fontana horror series, as near as I can make out a perverse twist on the "frog to prince" fairy tale archetype. Then there are a few more "classics" from Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft, plus a Cthulhu Mythos-adjacent entry from Robert Bloch.

For the other half of our selection, titled Spirits, Spooks and Other Sinister Creatures and graced with a cover that would make a kiddie-Halloween NES game blush, I'm going to have to be brief, and there's not nearly as much to talk about. The mix is shifted toward the "classics" end with Perceval Londons 1908 tale "Thurnley Abbey", and more from Saki, E.F. Benson and H. Rider Haggard. The last of whom contributes perhaps the worthiest entry, "Only A Dream", which adds the weightier themes of grief and guilt to already effective Gothic horror. On a similar classy vein is "Lodging For The Night" by Joan Aiken, who went from a Pan contributor to a respectable career, which I'm not sure I've read. On the science fiction side, there's "Mouse" by the criminally underrated Fredric Brown, a strange combination of invasion and possession, and perhaps "The Third Level" by Jack Finney. Also qualifying are "A Most unusual Murder", a time-travel tale with a side of true-crime toxic fandom by Bloch, and "Not Snow Nor Rain" by Miriam Allen Deford, another story I don't think I've gotten around to reading from a member of the original circle of Charles Fort. There's a few more on the actual kiddie vein, the most interesting of which is a short called "The Monster Of Poot Holler"; whose titular creature is described as "Thin as baling wire... (l)ong as a full grown tree".  Because there's no way a killer alien that can disguise itself as an extension cord will traumatize the kids...

And while I'm at it, a few illustrations, starting with the one for the Jerome piece!

And the space zombie story; he somehow looks heroic.

And the Lyon murder tale!

With that meandering look, I'm ready to call it a day. All in all, these anthologies stand first and foremost as what it was like growing up before the internet, ebooks, and generally having anything that isn't nailed down in copyright law at your fingertips. It was a simpler time, perhaps a gentler time, but then so much worse. Just as I am doing this, I am forcefully reminded that I used to scour these and similar books  to photocopy stories for my own files. Now, I have more than I could have dreamed of in my ebook libraries, including material from the same libraries, much of which I still haven't read. The old appeal definitely had a lot to do with the challenge. Still, I'd rather have the stories available both to me and everyone else a download away, and I hope to do my part to keep people aware of what actually good 1960s/ 1970s horror was like before the death of the public domain sends it to the grave. That's all for now, more to come!

Fantasy Zone: The one with a kid and stop motion demons

 

Title: The Gate

What Year?: 1987

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

I’m back with the second entry in a new feature, and the thought that’s been on my mind for a long time is that there are a lot of films that make me think “fantasy” that most people wouldn’t. The context for my way of thinking is that I grew up reading stuff from the pulp era, when magazines like Weird Tales and Unknown could publish the predecessors of everything from sword-and-sorcery to supernatural horror to science fiction, often from the same writers. What really revitalized horror and to a certain extent fantasy from the 1970s onward was new variations that blurred or bent lines that had really only emerged in the intervening decades, especially in the “urban” subsets of both genres. Horror was no longer centered on shenanigans in spooky mansions, and fantasy was no longer limited to swordsmen and wizards in pseudo-Medieval invented worlds. I offer the present selection as an example of the old made new brought to cinema, as a new angle on a film that those who would come here will likely be familiar with already. Here is The Gate, a film with demons, rock and roll, and surprisingly, no sex to speak or.

Our story begins with a spooky, moody shot of a kid returning home and finding himself alone in a rising storm. It turns out to be a dream, but on waking, he discovers that a tree in his back yard has fallen over, and his beloved dog has just died. We then meet his sister, whom he calls Al, and his friend Terry, who talks frequently about death and the occult with the air of someone who definitely isn’t afraid to pull things out of his posterior. Unsettling events continue to crop up, and Terry freely suggests that a portal to the netherworld has opened, literally based on a booklet included with a rock and roll album. When the parents leave the kids alone, things get spookier, as dozens of rodent-sized demon creatures pour out of the pit. As the final act draws near, the little group are captured by the unseen forces of evil, until the kid is left alone against a colossal monster that’s either the leader of the demons or the amalgamation of all of them together. His only hope is to find the perfect totem of light and life, before the portal brings Hell on Earth!

The Gate was a 1987 horror film directed by Tibor Takacs from a script by Michael Nankin. The film was produced by the Canadian company Alliance Entertainment, with filming mainly at a residence in Toronto, Canada. The film starred Stephen Dorff as Glen and Christa Denton as Al, with Louis Tripp as Terry and Scot Denton (apparently unrelated…) as the father. The film’s effects were provided by a crew led by William Randall Cook, known for Ghostbusters among other films. The demons/ creatures were created with a combination of stop-motion and suited actors. The film was an immediate if moderate success, earning $13.5 million against a $6M budget, and went on to enduring popularity on home video. The film received a sequel in 1990, with Takacs, Cook and Tripp all returning. Stephen Dorff went on to appear in Blade. The Gate has remained readily available, including free streaming in recent years.

For my experiences, this is another of many 1980s “cult” movies I didn’t see until college in the 2000s. I had considered reviewing it back when I started Space 1979 (see my Critters review), but never saw a way to reviewing it until I started Features Creature, which this feature is a spinoff to. Even then, I still went back and forth, particularly on the question of genre. It will be evident that I am very inclusive with what I consider fantasy versus horror, and there are a lot of works usually considered horror that I tend to view as “dark”, surrealist or urban fantasy. A few representative examples outside film are Lovecraft’s “Dreams In The Witch House”, King’s Rose Madder, and for that matter my own misbegotten tales of Carlos Wrzniewski. To me, tone alone makes a world of difference. Horror is characteristically pessimistic, full of passive, flawed or wholly unlikable characters as well as grim scenarios. Fantasy is about dynamic characters who resist heroically whatever the odds and ultimate outcome. In those terms, this movie is a definitive cinematic example, transforming the trappings of horror into a surprisingly poignant and ultimately hopeful story.

With that laid down, what I have long since admitted after many a viewing is that this is a cult movie people remember as much better than it is. It has a slow start, to put it mildly, with a lot of unnecessary asides along with a good amount of character development. Even as the supernatural events get in gear, there’s plenty of random supposed shocks that usually just annoy me. What’s easiest to forget is that there are a number of characters besides the main trio who remain long after any useful purpose had been fulfilled. Then when they do finally and mercifully leave, it just begs the question why the characters we care about don’t follow their example and get the Hell out (which per the lore might have been less of an issue with the original, possibly darker script). Still, these issues are standard for genre films then and now, often far worse in films with far higher budgets and profiles than this, and only prove that the film is part of its time.

On the other side, the strongest points of the film are the kids, the demons and the interplay between them. With the main characters, it will suffice to say that they are for once both likeable and well-acted by the genuinely young. There’s extra fun from Terry, handily generating loads of exposition that we certainly aren’t obliged to take at face value. There’s a good laugh in his casual remark, “You’ve got demons,” and an extra layer of sacrilege in his comment, “They’re older than the Bible.” There’s further room to wonder if his credulous belief is somehow feeding the enemy, especially as the group try to exorcize the evil presence with his input. The demons themselves appear surprisingly late yet immediately dominate. They’re eerie, agile little things brought to life with some of the latest and finest stop-motion animation, like an upgrade of the homunculi Harryhausen brought to life for the Sinbad movies. In their creepiest moments, they do little more than stare, and their appearance and not-quite-glassy eyes are utterly unnerving. What’s most unusual, and a major reason I favor putting the movie in the fantasy column, is that there’s never any serious doubt of their physical reality. It’s somewhat ambiguous whether they are individual entities, as we see a piece of one dissolve into worn-like pieces and later see them combine into the zombie-like workman. Yet, unlike certain other entities, they never simply appear or disappear, and when they attack, they grab, bite and are struck and thrown around in turn. The true masterpiece is the final monster, whose true nature I find ambiguous, which in its finest moment simply casts the kid aside before returning when he chooses his weapon.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and my personal favorite is early and random even by this movie’s standards. A bit past the 20-minute mark, we get are one sample of the rock and roll album, not music but a narration from a gleefully grim narrator. Terry wraps himself in a blanket as an improvised hood or shroud as he lip syncs the words. It’s a Lovecraftian creation myth, telling of the demons of primal chaos, pushed grudgingly aside by the creation of the world we know. Of course, they are ready to return, as the speaker declares with a flourish, and “reclaim what is theirs!” It’s good, bonkers fun, disconcertingly in line with the proto-Semitic myths that we now know underlay the Old Testament, and it tells us just as much as we need to know about an artifact that will figure large in the events ahead.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating, and this is one where I am genuinely conflicted. It might seem like I’m saying this movie is overrated, and in a sense I am. However, I am doing this to counter the danger of expectations, which aren’t going to do any favors. On a certain level, the film’s flaws only weigh it down because its beloved status makes it easy to be unpleasantly surprised, especially as either a newcomer or an old fan coming back to it after a long time. The film’s real strength is that it builds from an awkward start into something different and far improved, complete with an affirmation of faith, friendship and family values. That’s more than enough to keep it on my good side, as both a unique movie and a good one. And with that, I’m done, and happy.

Image credit VHS Collector.