Movie Scum

It was about fifteen years ago that I saw the most recent film based on the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I remembered the basic gist of the tale but not much else. Now, having seen the 1955 French thriller Diabolique (or Les Diaboliques), even without remembering much I can safely say the 1996 Americanized remake was far less effective than this version. There is a reason this is a highly regarded film in general. Christina Delassalle (Véra Clouzot) is in a tough situation. She runs a young boy’s boarding school with her husband Michel (Paul Meurisse) whose stern and controlling demeanor makes him hated by all including his wife. Michel harbors much resentment for Christina and she for him with his abusive and cheating mannerisms. After eight years together, Christina reaches the point where she wants Michel gone one way or another. She schemes with her closest companion Nicole (Simone Signoret), also Michel’s former mistress, and develop a f...

Since beginning this year’s Monster Scum marathon, I have had a blast catching up on old favorites and learning about classic movies that I had never seen before. I figured though that even though my viewing list is fashioned from the IMDb Top Horror Movie list, I would come across a film I either didn’t get or just didn’t like. Given that this is my first time viewing James Whale‘s original cinematic telling of Frankenstein, I can appreciate its impact on film and specifically monster movies, but this one just didn’t gel for me. Even having not read the original novel by Mary Shelley (though I’m sure I have the Cliff Notes version somewhere), the story of Frankenstein has been told so many times either in film or television or homaged elsewhere, it’s impossible not to know the genesis of the Monster. Henry Frankenstein (why not Victor?), the mad scientist who has a serious God complex and creates a being that ends up destroying its creator is nothing new even without seeing the ...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: in a small town, weird things start happening as the townsfolk who look seemingly normal turn into emotionless robots with only a few becoming aware of the differences. No, it’s not the plot to The Faculty. Despite the 1955 short story by Jack Finney and four movies based off of it (one of which we even covered last year), I have not seen any version of this tale but it seems so common because it has been remade and homaged (or in the case of The Faculty almost blatantly ripped off) countless times over the years. Yet, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a short and creepy thriller even though everything seems cliched by now. Doctor Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns home to Santa Mira, California with reports that most of the town wanted to see him for undisclosed reasons. Now though, everyone seems to be healthy and normal aside from the little boy who is almost mincemeat after running into the street trying to escape his mother...

It wasn’t until the past seven or eight years that I first saw The Exorcist. Back in probably 1999 or 2000, I bought a DVD with the intention on catching up with one of horror’s most renowned films but I didn’t get around to it until many years later when the random urge struck one night as I sat alone at home. Needless to say, the movie creeped me the hell out and even watching it today still invokes a strong sense of unease. It isn’t the “scariest” film in terms of jump-scares but William Friedkin‘s classic tale is still as unsettling today as I’m sure it was almost forty years ago. As I remarked when I reviewed this film’s sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic some time ago, I haven’t watched the original in some time. Of course the basic summary of the movie still stuck out as well as the priest who defenestrates himself but Exorcist excels just like the other classics I’ve covered like Halloween because we are not immediately thrust into the conflict. Friedkin (and writer William ...

Confession time: I’ve never seen King Kong, neither the original or the remakes. Still, the 50ish-foot gorilla is one of those legendary cinematic figures like Darth Vader or Freddy Kruger with a legacy that everyone knows even if you have not seen any of their films. Honestly, I can’t say I was expecting much out of Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack‘s tale of a captive beast gone wild in the streets of New York even though it still has a very positive rating. But holy crap was it really good! Beginning as I figure most early movies are (kind of stilted and stodgy), cryptic movie director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is about to set sail to an unknown island to film a “picture!” When his crew fails to turn up a young, attractive woman to star in the production, Denham goes out and recruits the shoplifter Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) to play the love interest with no questions asked. After they’ve embarked, Denham tells the captain and his right-hand man Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) o...

My how the world has changed since the 1930s. I can only imagine the chagrin that theater patrons were treated to while watching Tod Browning‘s Freaks, otherwise known as awesome horror film #24 by the IMDb. Yet, watching this film several decades later takes most of the shock and awe out of these characters. Instead of being shunned by society and making a living by begging or doing parlor tricks, abnormal, or unique if you’d rather, people have been featured in movies, TV series, and hell … even reality shows. Oh well, I can’t blame the film for the sad state of popular media today. Poor Hans (Harry Earles) just can’t seem to catch a break. He is smitten with the beautiful Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), even though she stands about three feet taller than his dwarfish frame. After being given extravagant gifts by the foolhardy Hans, Cleopatra and her beau Hercules learn that Hans has received a large inheritance and Cleopatra strings him along until the two get hitched at one of the...

Originally published January 7, 2010 Surprisingly, I had been missing out on John Carpenter’s The Thing until a few years ago when a friend of mine turned me on to it. I thought it was a very effective movie and the DVD was great, featuring commentary by Carpenter and Kurt Russell as well as an in depth documentary on the making of the film. Sadly, my original DVD was not anamorphic so I had no desire to watch the film in recent years until I upgraded my disc to the re-release from a few years back. For some reason, I didn’t remember much from the film so it was almost like watching it for the first time all over again. A loose remake of the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, Carpenter’s version puts us in the middle of an Antartic research team who uncover a monstrous alien who has already devastated another research camp. As the being infiltrates the tight group of men, it takes their appearance and mannerisms leading them to doubt as to who is human and who is not. It is...

During my personal dark ages of movies, otherwise known as the mid 2000s, there were a host of films that demanded viewing that I casually disregarded. Some of those I have come to regret. Others I have not seen at all. One that I made a point to see though was Shaun of the Dead. There was something about the film that stood out to me as important enough to see in theaters even though I ended up seeing it alone in a showing of about six people. It was billed as the zom-rom-com (or zombie romantic comedy) but only two of those adjectives really fit. With numerous hints and winks to other zombie films and properties in general, Shaun of the Dead is a movie that is crafted so well and foreshadowed so effectively, I almost guarantee that you can watch it many times over and find something new to grin or chuckle about. Our lovable slacker Shaun (Simon Pegg) is an everyman with no ambitions, no drive, and no desire for anything other than playing video games with his pal Ed (Nick Frost)...

Without watching, and thinking of, the two back to back, it is easy to miss the similarities between John Carpenter’s Halloween and George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead. Both were made by a bunch of amateur filmmakers on a minuscule price tag and both are highly regarded, not only in horror films, but in their respective sub-genres. Romero helped define the modern zombie as we know, and despise, it today. Previously, zombies were not autonomous flesh-eating beings, but pawns by some voodoo priest from some exotic locale. Now, zombie is not only a term for mindless folk enacting a set routine consistently (we’ll get to Shaun of the Dead soon enough) but also deadly slow (or fast depending on the movie) “people” out for blood by way of whatever reason is given or not. In fact, just like Halloween, the gist of the film (people trapped in a confined space battling deadies) has been done and done again to the point that it seems cliched. Night being the start, and to some extent th...

In the making-of documentary on my Halloween Blu-ray, John Carpenter remarked that Michael Myers’ signature mask reminded him of the mask worn by Christiane in Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans Visage), the French-language film by Georges Franju. The resemblance between the masks is uncanny but there are other similarities between these two great films. A few years previously, Christiane (Edith Scob), daughter of the renowned Docteur Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), was in a car accident that horribly mangled her face, leaving only her eyes intact. Christiane is secluded to the doctor’s estate after another young girl is found dead and Génessier identifies her as his “missing” daughter. Génessier has a wild notion (wild before the beauty of Face/Off that is) that a face can be transplanted from one person to another. With the guilt from causing the accident responsible for his daughter’s condition combined with his arrogance that he can actually succeed, Génessier and his assistant e...

John Carpenter may not be churning out classics like Halloween any longer, but his arguably most famous film seems to have been the perfect storm of dedication, foolishness, ambition and talent that elude most films. Made on a tiny $300k budget (or about $1 million today), Halloween would go on to become one of the most financially successful independent pictures ever, not to mention the impact it made on filmmakers and movie-goers even thirty years later.

Written by: Digger The role of a monster in storytelling is to be the manifestation of our fears and anxieties. The reason monsters come in so many varieties, (undead, giant beasts, aliens, demons, radioactive mutants) is because each one represents a different part of our world of which we are afraid. Zombies, vampires, and other humanoid monsters represent parts of the human condition and our own nature that we would rather not acknowledge. Aliens, on the other hand, represent our fears of things that are foreign and unfamiliar. As we are creatures of reason and define our world based on what we know, the unknown is a terrifying concept. The recent independent film Monsters tries to tap into both of these areas of the human psyche, with both alien creatures and with an unflattering portrayal of how society and governments deal with said giant aliens. The premise is that a U.S. Space probe returning to Earth carrying samples from one of Saturn’s moons crash landed in northern Mexi...

Written by: Digger Some people consider 1950′s era drive-in science fiction a low point in American cinema. It is true that a lot of garbage came out of studios who green-lit half-hearted scripts because they included space aliens or nuclear energy in them. Although several well made classics came out in the same time span, the stigma of the B movie is a hard one to shake. While there is no reason to be ashamed of enjoying the cheese, what reason would anyone have in making a film now that is intentionally cheesy? A movie that is part bad-sci-fi celebration and part bad-sci-fi parody is Alien Trespass, the story of an invasion in 1950′s America. Eric McCormack plays Ted Lewis, an astronomer that one clear night in his home near a California desert, prepares a wedding anniversary celebration with his wife loving wife Lana (Jody Thompson). Ted sees a bright shooting star in the night sky, which turns out to be a flying saucer that crashes in the desert. On board the ship are two extr...

Written by: Digger If there is one thing I have learned from watching creature-features in my lifetime, it’s that monsters love New York City. King Kong terrorized New York, although he was taken there against his will, the Beast from 20000 Fathoms rampaged through New York of his own accord. Even the fake Godzilla from the terrible 1998 American film thought New York City would be a lovely place to raise a brood of hatchlings. So, when it came time in 2008 to throw a new giant monster into the mix, what better place to have him destroy than the Big Apple. Unlike classic creature films, Cloverfield takes the audience on a journey through the eyes of the displaced masses. Basically, the story is told from the perspective of the guy that you would only see for a split second pointing and screaming in a Godzilla movie. It all comes to us via “found footage” from the hand-held camcorder of Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) and starts off with footage recorded a few days before the even...

Written by: Digger No one can deny that Stephen King is one of the most prolific writers working today. He has over forty-five published novels, nine collections of short-stories, and dozens of credits for films, TV shows and TV mini-series. While the success and worth of his various film adaptations is debatable, his impact on the entertainment industry is certain. One of my favorite movies to bare Stephen King’s name is Frank Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of The Mist. The set up for the film is easy enough to follow. Thomas Jane plays David, a professional artist living with his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz) and five-year-old son Billy. (Nathan Gamble) After a vicious storm knocks out the town’s power and knocks over several trees onto people’s cars and boat houses, David’s vacationing neighbor Brent (Andre Braugher) who is a New York attorney and has a bit of a history with David, asks David for a ride into town do buy some supplies. Before leaving, David and his wife notice...

Written by: Digger I love Bigfoot. I don’t believe that the legends about Sasquatches and Yetis are true, but the concept of the missing link or man-ape is a fascinating one, and right on the boarder of believability. I also love that there are so many movies about Bigfoot that are either family films or horror movies. Most of the horror movies featuring a Bigfoot monster are made on a shoestring budget, have Lance Hendrikson in them, and are only watchable due to how campy they are. These films fall into the sub-genre of “Sasquatchslpoitation.” The film that really highlights this sub-genre, and is also the best Sy Fy original movie I have ever seen, is Ryan Schifrin’s Abominable. We start off in this movie with a farmer discovering his horse slaughtered in the snow, then spying a huge dark figure lurking in the shadows. He and his wife run inside until it seems safe, and look outside to find massive footprints in the snow. Months later we find Matt McCoy (his second time on this ...

Written by: Digger For every Alfred Hitchcock, there is an Ed Wood. There are many talented directors working in the film industry today, but there are just as many infamously terrible directors churning out worthless trash on a regular basis. Uwe Boll, arguably the worst of the worst, has garnered a legion of haters since his earliest days in film making, and for many good reasons. “Doctor” Boll has no idea how tell a story visually, how to get good performances from actors, how to compose an interesting shot, or how to make a movie enjoyable in any way. After the cinematic train wreck that was House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, his second film to be released in American theaters, cemented the popular opinion of Boll as the king of schlock. The film opens with what is possibly the longest text crawl in movie history that flat out tells the audience this complicated back story about an ancient civilization and a dark world that they accidentally opened up and then some secret go...

Written by: Digger On the third of November, 1954, unsuspecting Japanese audiences were introduced to a character that would become the most recognizable movie monster of all time. Gojira (Godzilla to Americans) stomped his way into the popular consciousness throughout the next five decades. Godzilla has starred in a total of twenty-eight films (not including the crappy Roland Emmerich version) the latest of which is possibly the craziest of all. Godzilla: Final Wars was released on Godzilla’s 50th anniversary and, as the title implies, was meant to cap-off the latest series of Toho’s Godzilla films. We start off seeing a military unit from the Earth Defense Force that is engaging Godzilla at the South Pole. The strategic importance of defending the South Pole is up for debate, but a war ship named Gotengo launches a volley of missiles to bury Godzilla in an avalanche. Then a narration describes a brief history of Earth, stating that near constant warfare and pollution has released...

Written by: Digger I’m going to diversify things up a little here today and throw a lady monster in the mix. Darkness Falls is the story of a young boy Kyle who is terrorized by, of all things, the Tooth Fairy. This isn’t your grandma’s Tooth Fairy I’m talking about either, or the Tooth Fairy from that other horror movie The Tooth Fairy that came out in 2006. The undead creature haunting this picture is Matilda Dixon, and she wins the award for most complicated back story of any monster, ever. Matilda’s legend begins when she was a kindly old spinster woman in the town of Darkness Falls (sounds like a cheerful place) where she was loved by all the children for paying them money for there baby teeth that had fallen out. What she did with those teeth is anyone’s guess, but she was eventually caught in a house fire and her face was burned so badly that she hid her face behind a porcelain mask. On top of all that, she was blamed for the disappearance of two children and hanged by the t...

Written by: Digger Several legends of the common monster stable originated in European folklore, so it is oddly fitting when the creatures that American film industry have made popular become the focal point of a European production. Such is the case with Neil Marshall’s horror film Dog Soldiers, which has no shortage of -Spoiler Warning- werewolves. The film starts off with a young couple out for a romantic camping trip far from civilization, which in horror movie terms is pretty much a huge neon sign reading “Please attack us.” Sure enough, a big wolf hand reaches into the tent and makes short work of the two. Not too far away in the woods, a man is trying to escape from pursuers, but is eventually taken down. The man is Private Cooper (Kevin McKidd) and this was an exercise to test his resourcefulness for the British special forces. Captain Ryan (Liam Cunningham) is considering letting him join his team, but denies him entry, and beats the tar out of him, when Cooper refuses a d...