Ghoulish Tens: Movie Monsters

Posted on October 17, 2014 by admin

Awww, ain’t he cute? Tooth fairy from Hellboy II.

It’s time for another list, this time featuring our favorite, ghoulish movie monsters. I’m not including Godzilla, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, King Kong, Jaws, and wolf man. (I make one exception with regards to werewolves as noted below.) As much as I love these crazy guys, I wanted to take an eclectic look at some more modern yet still classic creatures. Once again, the list is in no particular order. Please sound off in the comments and add your own favorites and check out my Pinterest for some images of the monsters.

Pinhead from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Iconic. A creepy sadomasochist. “I will tear your soul apart.” “We have such sights to show you.” I’m morbidly fascinated. Pinhead is the leader of the Cenobites, Theologians of the Order of the Gash, “ageless experimenters in the higher reaches of pleasure.” Really messed up monks. Read Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart. It’s great and introduces aspects to the story not explored in the movie. I don’t know what it is about Clive Barker’s chilling ability to write about human’s relationship to their own flesh.

Alien Xenomorphs. Talk about awesome, ass-kicking design inspired by the surrealist H.R. Giger. (Google H.R. Giger alien lithograph for some awesome images.) Oh yeah, acid blood.

Guillermo del Toro gets two entries because he is just awesome that way. (When will we get At the Mountains of Madness? Pretty please?) First creature is Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. Eyeball hands. Eats children. Pan was also very creepy and dark, but to pick one truly hellish monster, hands down Pale Man. Did I mention he eats children?

And second are the teeth fairies from Hellboy II, pictured above. They are soooo cute, just keep them away from your teeth! I also love the Angel of Death pictured here from Hellboy II. Del Toro definitely has an eye fetish.

The flesh eating crawlers from the Descent. Have you seen this movie? Talk about claustrophobic horror. Must. See. Now. (I think you can stream on Netflix.) We don’t know the origin of the crawlers, how they evolved in the caves, but they are humanoid enough for my over-active and sometimes twisted mind to just go there…

Brundlefly from The Fly. Just uck. The wonderful special effects in transforming Jeff Goldblum into a vomiting insect. Horror and pathos. I’ve said it before, the best horror movies bring both together brilliantly. The way Cronenberg directed Jeff Goldblum’s transformation was like someone suffering from a terminal disease and mourning the loss of his relationship with Geena Davis. Sad, powerful stuff.

The thing from The Thing. This scene alone:

Man, I miss old school special effects.

Evil Dead‘s Naturon Demonto (Sumerian Book of the Dead) demons, most notably possessed tree. You can’t beat Sam Raimi for campy, no holds bared horror blood fest, but mostly I love how over the top his demon possessed people act.

David Naughton’s American werewolf from American Werewolf in London. My one exception to the werewolf exception. One of the best or just flat out the best transformations in movie special effects history.

The velociraptors from Jurassic Park. Spielberg made a great decision in featuring these guys in addition to the T Rex. The T Rex is a big brute, but the velociraptors are smart, pack hunters. Best quote from Robert Muldoon, Game Warden: “They show extraordinary intelligence, even problem-solving intelligence. Especially the big one. We bred eight originally, but when she came in she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one… when she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.”

Ghoulish Tens: Vampire Movies

Posted on October 2, 2014 by admin

Happy October!! It’s that time of year when I can indulge my predilection for creepiness and candy, and just chalk it up to Halloween 🙂 So to feed the inner ghoul, I’ll be posting Ghoulish Ten lists related to movies until Halloween. Next week I’ll cover the best movie monsters.

Vampire movies!

I’m really not covering the classics here (despite the great Bela Lugosi pictured to the right) because I wanted to feature some less well-known, some more well-known, amazing films with an interesting take on vampires, or films that just rocked 🙂 So I didn’t include the Bela Lugosi Dracula or the Francis Ford Coppola version, Interview with a Vampire, and Nosferatu. They are classics that belong on every best list. I also didn’t rank the movies so they are in no particular order. I included pictures from the movies on my Pinterest page so click on over.

Lost Boys. Youth rebellion and Jim Morrison, Keifer Sutherland and his glam-rock vampire crew, Michael Patrick, gramps, and the great inter-play between Cory Feldman and Cory Haim, some great one-liners, 80s soundtrack, awesome!

Fright Night. Not the remake. I saw the remake. It was okay. When you don’t have Chris Sarandon playing Jerry Dandridge or the late, great Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent or Evil Ed, what’s the point? The scene where Peter Vincent kills Evil Ed’s wolf creature was sublime. Perfect blend of horror and pathos. Possibly my favorite vampire movie.

Salem’s Lot, 1979 version. Beyond being one of the most terrifying television movies made, earns a spot simply for keeping me awake for at least a week after watching the scene where newly formed vampire Danny comes knocking on Mark Petrie’s window at night. Therapy. Lots.

Side notes. Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame directed Salem’s Lot. I read the Stephen King short story Jerusalem’s Lot, set in the same town as Salem’s Lot. Great short story! Just the line…”there are spiritually noxious places, buildings where the milk of the cosmos has become sour and rancid.” Thanks Stephen! I think.

Near Dark. The dark matter Twilight? Brutal. Biker western. Teen romance. Kathryn Bigelow directed. Bill Paxton as a blood-sucking sociopathic. ‘Nuff said.

Vampire’s Kiss. This was one of the Raising Arizona-Moonstruck-Wild at Heart-Nicholas Cage performances as opposed to the Ghost Rider-Season of the Witch-I’ll act in anything for money-Nicholas Cage. In it, Cage believes he is turning into a vampire. He even buys a pair of fake, plastic teeth and bites someone in a scene that perfectly straddles the line between horror and pathos, like Fright Night. (I find a certain level of perfection in scary movies that can strike those chords.) It’s billed as a dark comedy horror and it does have some great comedic moments but once again, just tragic, especially the ending, despite the fact that Cage’s character is pretty repulsive.

Let the Right One In. I heard Let Me In is really good in its own right with its own take so I’m adding it to my must see list. What stood out for me with Let the Right One In was the “realistic” take, the vampire being a young girl, and the focus on the relationship between her and her chosen male companions. She was both a ferocious vampire and lonely young girl, looking for companionship.

Cronos. Guillermo del Toro. Guillermo del Toro. The concept is unique and cool, about an alchemist who invents a scarab device that injects its victim with a solution granting eternal life and a thirst for blood. Guillermo has such a stylistic approach to his gore and monsters. He’s still trying to get his adaption of At the Mountains of Madness off the ground, and I, for one, have my fingers doubly crossed.

The Addiction. I love Lili Taylor. In The Addiction, she plays a philosophy student attacked and bitten by a female vampire. The movie explores her gradual transformation into a vampire and moral degradation. It explores philosophy as espoused by Nietzche and Decartes and whether the fault lies in the vampires being themselves and true to their addiction or in the weakness of their prey.

Shadow of the Vampire. A fictionalized account of the making of the Nosferatu classic with Willem DaFoe as Nosferatu and John Malkovich as the director, F.W. Murau. The premise plays out brilliantly. F.W. Murau hired a character actor, Max Schreck, a.k.a. our fiendish Nosferatu, to play said blood sucker and, because he’s so dedicated to his craft, while filming, he stays in character. The interactions between “Schreck” and the cast are sometimes funny with dark undertones. In one scene, a bat flies by and Schreck catches it and sucks its blood. The other actors are impressed by his dedication to his character. The filming harkens back to silent films. I cannot stress how amazing Willem DaFoe was as Nosferatu.

Blade. He rocks. And one of the first comic book movies released, after the atrocious Joel Shumacher Batman ones, to take comic books heroes down a darker path.

Movies I haven’t seen that sound intriguing: Kiss of the Damned (looks very sexy), John Carpenter’s Vampires (I was initially turned off by this movie, but am hearing good things about it and I do love John Carpenter.) 30 Days of Night. I know, what am I waiting for?

What are some of your favorites and why?

And don’t forget to check out my Pinterest site for pictures of these movies and some others I didn’t cover in the post!

Freaks

Posted on August 29, 2014 by admin

The upcoming fourth season of American Horror Story is called FreakShow and, as the title intones, will involve circus sideshow performers. Immediately, I thought of the Tod Browning movie, Freaks, and wondered how/if the old movie will influence the tone and feel of American Horror Story. Just the teaser trailer, linked below, hints at a homage to Freaks.

I don’t want to reveal what that image makes me think of in relation to Freaks because it might give too much away about Freaks and I don’t want to, because for all horror aficionados, Freaks deserves a watch.

Tod Browning’s Freaks came out in 1932. That fact in of itself is shocking because the movie, even by today’s standards, is terrifying. This movie did not need gory special effects to make its horror felt by viewers. Bravo ranked it number 15 in its 100 scariest movies of all time. The original version of the movie was never released, considered too shocking, and no longer exists or so they say. One of the cut scenes concerns a man singing in falsetto and that is all I’ll say about that! Tod Browning’s career apparently suffered from making the movie and never recovered. This is the man who directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi. For Freaks, Browning derived his inspiration from actual experience, having joined a traveling circus at sixteen.

At the start of Freaks, a sideshow barker beckons customers to visit the sideshow. One woman looks into a box and screams at what she sees inside. The barker explains how the horror in the box was once a beautiful and talented trapeze artist, Cleopatra. The rest of the movie shows how Cleopatra and her lover (the future falsetto mentioned above) conspired for her to seduce and marry sideshow midget Hans after learning of his large inheritance.

Browning takes his time establishing the “normalcy” of the deformed “freaks” via vignettes, showing them eating, drinking, hanging laundry: normal acts shown in an odd light given they are done by people without arms, legs, etc. The “freaks” are kind to each other and pose no threat while the “normal” people plot to take poor Hans’ fortune.

Once Hans marries Cleopatra, the tone of the movie takes a sharp left turn into weirds-ville. No wonder the 1930s movie goers freaked out. We have Koo Koo the Bird Girl who shimmies her hips on the table in crude burlesque form. At one point, Cleopatra takes her midget hubby Hans on her back for a horsey ride. From here on out, tension builds as the sideshow performers suspect something’s up and keep a constant vigil on their friend Hans, peeking through windows, catching Cleopatra trying to poison Hans. The sideshow performers, discovering her plot, chase her and attack her in a gruesome, unseen confrontation, culminating in her becoming a sideshow “freak” herself.

The film has been criticized and praised. Some saw it as a commentary on Hollywood’s treatment of its talent like sideshow performers, as trashy exploitation of the actual sideshow performers, and as a grim morality tale. I like to think Browning, who had actually worked with sideshow performers wanted to portray them in a sympathetic light, demonstrate how you can’t judge a book by its cover, and that the sideshow performers aren’t freaks after all. Regardless, once seen, Freaks is never forgotten.

The actors in Freaks were actual side show performers with real deformities. Here’s a picture of some of the performers who played in the movie. When I was writing Necromancer’s Seduction, my merry trio, Ruby, the necromancer; Kara, the witch; and Adam, the revenant, went to a carnival and shared thoughts on whether supernaturals once maybe sought refuge in circus side shows. They repeat one of the famous lines from the movie, still referenced in pop culture today. Here’s the scene from Necromancer’s Seduction. At the end, Adam says the infamous line.

“The traveling carnivals in the early nineteen hundreds were cool, especially the sideshow freaks,” Kara said as we maneuvered through the throngs of families pushing strollers and teens yelling as they assessed their possibilities of hooking up. Hawkers called out, inviting us to play ring toss or Whack- A-Mole. The smell of cinnamon from frying churros warmed the cool night air around us.

“You looking for a new job?” I asked.

“You know, some of the old circus and carnival freaks were supernaturals,” she said.

“That’s kind of depressing. So was the hairy man a werewolf?”

“I don’t know, but maybe it wasn’t so depressing. The carnivals allowed them to come out of hiding, to a certain extent.”

She bumped into me to avoid being hit by a kid running to get on the Twist-O-Rama ride.

“Why would they like being gawked at? Treated like a freak for being themselves?” I asked.

“Did you ever see the old black and white movie Freaks about the circus sideshow freaks?” she asked. “The non-freak trapeze artist and her boyfriend schemed to kill one of the midgets because he was rich. She pretended to love him and married him.”

“Gobble, gobble, we accept her, one of us,” Adam said in a squeaky voice. “That’s one of the best movie lines ever. They cast real people with deformities as the sideshow freaks.”

“That movie was horrifying in ways horror directors today could never imitate,” I said, images from the movie vivid in my mind. When the sideshow freaks found out that the trapeze artist planned to kill their midget friend, they attacked her, turning her into a deformed freak. “They don’t make movies like that anymore.”

The Front Yard

Posted on November 8, 2013 by admin

In attempting to find the right balance between blogging about releases, writing stuff, author guests, I thought I’d include the occasional, general post about stuff and am calling it The Front Yard, because I often have great conversations with my neighbors in our front yard, often after corralling their chicken. (Talk about free range and we get fresh eggs too!) We cover a myriad of topics from life in general to tv and movies because we are for the most part, geeks. Although I surprised my neighbor recently by admitting I had never watched Doctor Who. Even I have limits.

So I chaperoned my son’s kinder class on a school field trip to a local farm. While my voice grew hoarse constantly rounding up my charges, (the second you get one little critter next to you, the next one had taken off), I had lots of fun. We picked vegetables, walked through a corn maze, and, one of my son’s favorite moments, saw the llama poop.

TV: Holy cow. American Horro Story: Coven. I’ve been loving this season. Didn’t watch season one, couldn’t really get into season two (don’t need to see lobotomies and why the serial killer?), but Coven seems to have found the right balance, and Kathy Bates, Jessica Lange, and Angela Bassett??? How can it not rock? I appreciate these actresses even more, because they could totally go the scene chewing route, but while they do dominate their scenes, they know how to tone it down. But last episode’s zombie takedown via chainsaw!!! I wanted to shout. What awesome Evil Dead carnage. It was ridiculous, especially when she split the one zombie in half, vertically. I’m truly curious as to what’s going to happen with Sarah Paulson’s character (Fiona’s daughter) now that she’s blind but can see, and I called Zoe being the Supreme in the first episode 🙂 Can’t wait for next week!

Still trying to fit Marvel Agents of Shield. It’s one of those shows that just doesn’t feel right, like the shirt that’s too tight on the shoulders. I never read the comic, never got into Shield all that much, but have learned enough about Shield from their appearances in the comics I do read. And this tv group does not feel like Shield. They feel like the minor league Shield. And I can’t understand why they aren’t drawing upon the Marvel universe more. Maybe it’s ABC, making the show more wide reaching (read bland), but Whedon can do so much better! While he’s not writing the show, his brother and brother’s wife (I think) are the writers, he is the producer. Who knows? Maybe the Whedon formula is finally wearing out its welcome, or maybe you can’t just paste the Whedon tropes on meh actors and meh writing and expect it to work. We’ll see.

On a more exciting front, Marvel and Netflix announced a deal to bring multiple live-action series featuring Daredevil, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Jessica Cage, all in their own shows, leading up to a Defenders mini-series. Now that’s what I’m talking about. I think a Netflix series will be less constrained than a major network show and I find the approach intriguing, not to mention, characters like these will adapt well to the small screen.

Speaking of Marvel, can’t wait to see Thor this weekend. From what I’ve read and seen in trailers, this looks to be wider in scope, more of the nine realms, and a more hands on, grounded approach to the fighting and physical appearance of Asgard. And we get to see Heimdall with his helmet off = Idris Elba! Continue reading →

The Conjuring and other not so scary stuff

Posted on August 3, 2013 by admin

Part of what you’ll see on my blog from time to time is a discourse on movies, comics, general pop, fan girl culture which feeds my soul. I am a Geek at heart. But first off, I sent in book two, The Necromancer’s Betrayal, to the publisher for the first round of edits. I’m excited about book two but wary as well. The events really test the characters and change some of them, for better or worse? Betrayal is one of those fulcrum books that tips the lever, sending everyone reeling. They also spend more time in the demon realm which was fun to write.

I hadn’t realized how tightly I was wound up until I hit send on that book. My stress levels were pretty high, trying to meet deadlines and take care of all my other responsibilities. Now I basically only have book three to write and polish up my pirate book for self publishing later this year, and fit in time to polish up my short story about the werewolf Brandon, featured in Necromancer Seduction. I feel pretty relieved.

So I did manage to catch the Conjuring, which I’d been anticipating for a long time. Directed by James Wan, the auteur of the first Saw and Insidious. What got me hot and bothered about The Conjuring was Wan intended to harken back to the traditional, atmospheric scary haunted house movies, and did he, but more on that later.

The movie is based on an actual haunting investigated by Lorraine and Ed Warren portrayed wonderfully by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson. Say what you will about the Warrens (who also investigated Amityville), I’d love to visit yet not touch their collection of haunted artifacts. Lorraine Warren actually had a brief cameo in the classroom scene. She was seated in the audience.

Wan did a great job portraying a haunted house movie set in the seventies. It felt like a movie filmed in the 70s, kind of like The House of the Devil, directed by Ti West. I saw lots of 70s horror flicks as a kid, so watching these types of movies, where the director calls upon that atmosphere really appeals to me. Ti West also did The Innkeepers which had its share of jump in your seat moments. I give lots of credit to directors who can still get you on the edge of your seat with scenes in which a character is stepping into a dark basement, or walking down a darkened hallway. Wan accomplished that and more. (And I will never play a hide and seek game involving hand clapping. Never.) It’s too easy to rely on gore or some such to get the audience to react. Wan doesn’t need to in the Conjuring. He gives us plenty of scary dolls, and one scene that really did make me hop in my seat and sent my heart racing. I also enjoyed some homage moments to movies like Poltergeist.

The ending was scary, but not in the sense of what actually happened, but by the set up, the implication. I did like his take on the possession sequence, giving something a little different than what we’ve seen in movies like the Exorcist. And Lili Taylor portrayed that perfectly. I can’t imagine having to act out a scene like that. For any Lili Taylor fans, of which I am, she did a movie called The Addiction in the 90s about a grad student who turns into a vampire after getting bitten by one, and then tries to come to terms with her frequent craving for human blood. It was a great, little known vampire movie.

So if you like good, old atmospheric haunted house type movies, definitely check out The Conjuring. Oh, last but most definitely not least, the sound track is incredibly unnerving. In fact, the scene where the family arrives at the house with the music playing just gave it that epic feel, same feeling when watching Halloween and that god-awful, yet brilliant movie score starts playing. That’s what I’m talking about.

Keeping Us Guessing

Posted on April 3, 2013 by admin

An interesting, fun movie just came out in limited release (ugh! translate not in Phoenix), Room 237, exploring the many interpretations and even some far fetched conspiracy theories surrounding The Shining. The film makers drew on theories presented by various people who have amassed enormous archives of Shining interpretations. It’s unbelievable. Rob Ager is one example and is featured in Room 237: Rob Ager.

After watching a few Kubrick movies, which also includes 2001, I do agree he explores themes like imperialism and how it has led to a legacy of violence in human history. Room 237 covers those various theories, like references to Native American genocide and the Holocaust, but still much argument and discussion abounds as to what the movie is really about. To me, film critic for Salon.com, Andrew O’Heir summed it up well:

…this really is a story about a guy going crazy in a snowbound old hotel and turning on his wife and kid, but one that draws on the most troubling aspects of myth, history and psychoanalytic theory to create an overdetermined landscape of madness, one in which the viewer ultimately feels almost as disoriented as Jack, frozen in permanent rage at the heart of the labyrinth.

Interpretation aside, what I find compelling with Kubrick and his movies, or at least The Shining, is how he composes his scenes and populates his movies with lots of detail and symbols. The Shining contains so many references to Native American culture, genocide, symbols, it hard to argue he wasn’t making some kind of statement.

But even better are the flashes of straight out strangeness. The twin girls, the blood flowing out of the elevator, the (grimace) decayed old lady in Room 237. And what the heck is the deal with the guy in the bear suit? Creepy. Maybe that’s simply the point, and an explanation would ultimately ruin the impact of the scene. Some film directors explain too much and Kubrick often explained nothing. Room 237 does provide possible explanations for all of those scenes however.

I was writing a scene in my second book, where one of the bad guys was revealing some of his motivations, and I wavered between how much I needed to explain and decided to leave it vague.

Take the movie The Warriors. (Another one of my favorites) At the end, the leader of the Gramercy Riffs gang asks Luther, the leader of the Rogues, why he shot Cyrus. Luther answers simply, “No reason. I just like doing things like that.” He’s friggin’ nuts. We totally get that and we don’t need an exposition on the tragedy of his life.

Explaining too much can take away from the mystery and emotion behind certain aspects of the story. Some character behaviors should be left up to interpretation. Why is the bad guy bad? Was it childhood trauma? Socio-pathetic tendencies? Why did Jack Torrance try to hack up his wife and kid? We don’t know exactly. Was it cabin fever? Writer’s block? (OH, crap, no.) Or was it him perpetuating the endless cycle of violence due to imperialism? Kubrick doesn’t tell us and personally I don’t want him to. (Not that he could at this point.) It’s enough for me to see the scene with Jack talking to the previous caretaker, John Grady, in the bathroom, about correcting his wife and kid (yikes) and seeing him in the Forth of July ball picture from 1921 at the end. What what it all about? Kubrick keeps us all guessing, writing, and making movies about it to this day. If he would have explained everything, there wouldn’t be a Room 237.

Funny, Warm Zombies

Posted on February 19, 2013 by admin

So I finally squeezed in a couple of hours to see Warm Bodies, the zombie love story. And it really is a zombie love story, in more ways than one. I went with my teen step-daughter with fairly low expectations, expecting a fairly straight forward (okay, maybe not so straight forward since it’s zombie love) teen angst kind of deal, which it was, and wondering if the directors and writers could pull off a love story between a normal girl and a zombie. Well, I wonder no more, because they did.

Part of why it worked was the humor. And to help the young couple along, Rob Corddry played R’s (the zombie guy) zombie bud. I love Rob Corddry, starting with his Daily Show stint to movies such as Hot Tub Time Machine. The actor who played R also did a good job with the humor, from his shambling body language, grunts, and adoring, often bloodied expressions of affection toward Julie. He pulled off emo zombie perfectly!

Another aspect I liked was the brain eating. 🙂 Not the gore (although the film was not overtly gory), but the way it showed R slowly regaining his humanity. I can’t explain too much without giving too many spoilers. Suffice it to say, when a zombie ate someone’s brains, they absorbed the victim’s memories. It was a nice touch.

And, heck yeah, such a relief from some of the current paranormal teen movie fare. What a great, quirky, different entry into the genre.

Yes, there were moments when I rolled my eyes and groaned at the obvious plot holes, and the way the zombies were saved. I won’t spoil it, but it was overly simplistic and hard to swallow. But I traded the cheese for some great comedic moments, fun acting, and nice touches, like with the zombie kids. Yes, they pulled at this mom’s heart strings. What can I say? I guess I’m a sucker for zombie love.

Mimi Sebastian

On the dark side of love

Category Archives: movies