// Category Archive for: Horror

DVD Review: Blood Car

By Brad Henderson

Well, I just watched Blood Car. I freaking loved Blood Car.

Blood Car was apparently made in 2007 and is just now getting a physical media release in 2015. Criminal. Going into it I wasn’t expecting much because it seemed from the plot and cover art it was going to be an overly gory schlock fest. Well, it was an overly gory schlock fest but a damn fine one that had me tearing up I was laughing so hard. That’s something to be said because I’m not really a “LOL-er” or whatever the hell you call it. I laugh, but it’s mostly inside. Soulless is another name for it, so I’ve been told.

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Blu-Ray Review: The ABCs Of Death 2

By Brad Henderson

W Is For Wish

The setup for The ABCs Of Death is brilliant. Get 26 badass directors and give them some cash to make something sick and twisted. Unfortunately, not structuring it properly resulted in an extremely discombobulated flick with some high quality shorts among a barrage of lame and not so great ones. When I first saw the movie I was extremely disappointed, but over the past few years I’ve grown to love a handful of shorts and continue to watch them on and off again. D, L, O, Q, R, S, U, and Y were my favorites but everything else was either very bland or just not good. Now we have The ABCs Of Death 2 which is completely different. Regrettably, that “difference” is that they are all quality shorts but very few are entertaining.

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DVD Review: The Scared Stiff Collection, Vol. 1

By Jeffery X Martin

You know that moment when you first start getting a hangnail? You know you should get the clippers and cut it off before it becomes a real hassle, but instead, you play with it. You twist it around, push it back into the already ruptured skin, or pull on it. Sometimes, you can make it bleed. It hurts. You know you should stop. You don’t even understand why you’re putting yourself through that pain. But you keep doing it because part of you, a dark nameless section of your psyche, enjoys it. It loves the pain. It needs the humiliation.

If you’re a fan of that level of masochism, you’ll have a great time with The Scared Stiff Collection, Vol. 1. Low-budget horror can be a wonderful thing. Even some zero-budget stuff can be all right. But there are some movies that are not watched as much as they are gawked at, where wretched ineptitude is the real star of the show and it hurts.

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Blu-Ray Review: V/H/S: Viral

By Brad Henderson

The V/H/S series is something I’ve loved and hated at the same time. I say that with the utmost respect; I’m not trying to be an asshole. When the first installment was released I was fucking stoked. Between the filmmakers involved and the trailer that was released, I couldn’t wait until the day I saw it. I remember very vividly renting it at midnight on VOD and being overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. I’ve actually felt this way with every entry and that’s because all the installments are 50/50 for me.

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Blu-Ray Review: Starry Eyes

By Less Lee Moore

So much of the success of Starry Eyes rests on lead actress Alex Essoe’s able shoulders. She beautifully embodies the role of Sarah, a budding actress who pines for the role that will catapult her into the pantheon of the Old School Hollywood ladies whose photos adorn her bedroom walls. Surrounded by struggling fellow thespians, one of whom (Erin) wants to cut her down at every opportunity, Alex’s insecurity and fragility is palpable and painful to witness. Forced to pay the bills working at a Hooters-type restaurant, she is thrilled when she gets an audition from the esteemed Astraeus Pictures.

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Best Of 2014: Carol Borden

Red Sonja

I am terrible at lists and ranking art against other art, so I’m taking some liberties with the concept of “Best of 2014” and sharing six comics and five films that I enjoyed or found thought-provoking in 2014.

Comics:

Alex + Ada (Image, ongoing) Sarah Vaughn, writing; Jonathan Luna, art/story.
After a rough break-up, Alex’s aunt gives him a female android for “companionship.” Alex is disturbed by Ada’s seeming humanity and takes her to an underground network to have her sentience illegally unlocked. Alex + Ada cleverly subverts the fembot trope, exploring the complexity of relationships and being human, passing, being closeted, and the history of dehumanizing people into property. Luna’s calm artwork is perfect for an android coming into her own in a world terrified of her.

Gotham Academy (DC) Becky Cloonan & Brendan Fletcher, writing; Karl Kerschl, art.
If you like girl detectives in creepy old private schools, Gotham Academy might be for you. At Gotham City’s fanciest private school, Olive Silverlock investigates strange goings on, including a ghost, and her sorta-ex-boyfriend’s little sister Maps tags along. It’s Manga-influenced with neat coloring and just plain fun, and if you like girl detectives, you’ll probably like Gotham Academy.

Red Sonja (Dynamite) Gail Simone, writing; Walter Geovani, art.
Like Saga, which I wrote about last time, Red Sonja is a comic I read every month. Unlike Saga, I never expected that. It’s a subversive, funny, and action-packed barbarian comic. Read as Red Sonja duels a master swordsman, rescues a beautiful dancer (who is also a gay man), refuses to bathe, and desperately tries to get laid. And always make sure to get Jenny Frison’s covers. Her work is gorgeous. (She’s also doing some great covers for Revival.)

Showa: A History of Japan (Drawn & Quarterly) by Shigeru Mizuki.
Showa is a stunning achievement. Mizuki presents the history of Japan from during the reign of Emperor Hirohito (1926 – 89) in four volumes. He covers Japan’s descent into fascism and Imperialism, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the American occupation, post-War unrest, and Japan’s rise as an economic power. Mizuki’s draftsmanship is extraordinary, rendering his personal history and Japan’s history in almost photorealistic drawing and in expressive cartoons. And his writing is almost transparent, smoothly presenting a tremendous amount of material that mixes the personal and the political, local and global, the supernatural and the mundane.

The Wicked & The Divine (Image) Kieron Gillen, writing; Jamie McKelvie, art.
The Wicked & Divine comes across as almost a sequel to Gillen and McKelvie’s Phonogram—books about people whose magical power derived from music. Pop music. Club music. But where Phonogram was a testament to the personal power of music and to a certain time in the London club scene, The Wicked & The Divine is more cosmic in scope. Every 90 years, gods return to earth. They live for three years, putting on amazing concerts, and then they die, only to return again 90 years later. This time, someone dies when the Bowie-esque Lucifer snaps her fingers, turning humans against the gods, and the gods against each other.

Velvet (Image) Ed Brubaker, writing; Steve Epting, drawing; Elizabeth Breitweiser, colors.
Velvet is almost the secret life of Miss Moneypenny, if Miss Moneypenny were framed for murder and, possibly, treason. She’s been working as the secretary to ARC-7’s director, she’s still a deadly field agent, and she uses all her skills to find out who framed her and why. After years of paperwork and dealing with flirtatious, hotshot agents, her colleagues underestimate Velvet, but only for a little while. If you’ve always wanted to discover that Miss Moneypenny has a secret life, you’ll probably like Velvet. As with Brubaker’s Fade-Out, Fatale, Criminal, and Incognito, it’s worth buying Velvet in single issues to get each issue’s closing essay.

Movies

Cold In July (2014) dir. Jim Mickle, starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepherd, Don Johnson, and Vinessa Shaw.
Richard (Hall), a husband, father, and framing store owner, shoots and kills a burglar in his home. When the burglar’s father, Ben (Shepherd), shows up at the funeral and threatens Richard very congenially, Cold In July seems like it will be a straightforward revenge thriller. Then the story doesn’t so much take a twist as it takes a turn and the next thing you know, Jim Bob (Johnson) is walking into Richard’s store looking to get a pin-up framed. The chemistry between Hall, Shepherd, and Johnson is fantastic and Don Johnson does some engaging and entertaining work with his character, Jim Bob. Cold In July might be my favorite movie of 2014. It’s based on a book by Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale, which always helps. Jim Mickle really comes into his own with Cold In July. The visuals are a nice blue and red homage to late Eighties film. The exposition isn’t overstated. And the soundtrack is almost perfect, and leaves some room for silence.

Snowpiercer (2014) dir. Bong Joon-ho, starring Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Ed Harris, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, Ko Ah-sung, John Hurt. . . and it’s probably best to go check IMDb.
Snowpiercer is a satisfying dystopian film serving as an allegory for general global inequality and state violence as well as a very particular criticism of South Korean politics and society. Curtis (Chris Evans) leads an uprising of the train’s tail end lumpenproletariat against the elite in the front of the train―with a little help from Namgoong Minsoo (Song Kang-ho). Bong Joon-ho is one of my favorite directors and he made two of my favorite films, The Host (2006) and Memories of Murder (2003). But while Snowpiercer is not as good as either, there are two things I love that put it on this list: Song Kang-ho and Bong Joon-ho’s idea of a “cinema republic.” I am so excited to see these actors working together in an adaptation of a French graphic novel shot in the Czech Republic with South Korean and American writers and producers, a British action choreographer, a Korean cinematographer, and a cast of fine actors from all over the world. It’s like Bong Joon-ho picked every every actor he ever wanted to work with and put them on a train hurtling toward the cinema republic. In a time with so many bland blockbusters inspiring bland imitations in global cinema (*cough* China’s bloated historical epics *cough*), Snowpiercer is just plain heartening.

The Duke Of Burgundy (2014) dir. Peter Strickland, starring Sidse Babette Knudsen and Chiara D’Anna.
An homage to the ”Eurosleaze” films of the 1960s and 1970s, The Duke of Burgundy quietly subverts its genre. Cynthia (Knudsen) and Evelyn (D’Anna), colleagues in the study of insects, explore their kinks in a small village. The film explores how fantasy is negotiated in relationships and how relationships, like D/s scenes and films, have their scripts. And I find it remarkable that a film focusing on formal film structure can be so warm and compassionate when so much formalism comes off as cold and misanthropic. (There is also “specially designed furniture” and mole crickets.)

The Raid 2: Berandal (2014) dir. Gareth Evans; starring Iko Uwais, Arafin Putra, Yayan Ruhian, Tio Pakusodewo, Oka Antara, Alex Abbad, Cecep Arif Rahman, Julie Estelle, Ryuhei Matsuda, Kenichi Endo.
The Raid 2 gives everyone all the amped-up fighting we were looking for, with brutal new twists: Hammer Girl (Estelle) fighting half a dozen yakuza brothers and killing them with her two claw hammers; an amazing karambit-carrying silat master (Cecep Arif Rahman); prison shivvings; and harrowing car stunts. But Raid 2 is much more of a thriller in the mould of John Woo’s Hardboiled (though without the whimsy) or Andy Lau’s Infernal Affairs. Rama (Iko) survives the events of The Raid only to go undercover in one of Jakarta’s most powerful gangs. Rama serves two years in prison to earn the trust of Uco (Arifin Putra), son of the gang’s boss. But things get complicated, as they always do. There’s another Jakarta gang plus the yakuza involved, and the police themselves might be setting Rama up. If you were curious, Mad Dog (Yayan) might not have survived that fluorescent tube through the throat, but Prakoso (Yayan) really seems to take after Mad Dog in terms of his skills and his singular focus on fucking people up.

What We Do In The Shadows (2014) dir. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement; starring Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, Rhys Darby, Jonathan Brugh, Jackie Van Beek, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, and Stu Rutherford.
Deacon, Viago, Vlad, and Peter are vampire roommates in Wellington, New Zealand. A documentary crew follows them as they deal with daily life, encounter stinky werewolves, make friends, try to get into Wellington’s clubs, and prepare for the annual Unholy Masquerade Ball, bringing the vampire, zombie, and witch communities of Wellington together. Who knew the undead community in Wellington was so active? Clever, fun, and hilarious.

Besides writing about comics for The Cultural Gutter and movies for various places, Carol Borden’s short story, “The Itch of Iron, The Pull of the Moon” was just published in Fox Spirit Books’ anthology, Drag Noir.

Best Of 2014: Peter Counter

Hannibal

Climate change. Isis. The police. A growing feeling of insignificance. These are the monsters we live with every day of our increasingly fragile lives, and in 2014 it affected our art in a very pervasive way. If it can be said that pop culture is the dream of our society, an expression of our collective unconscious scribbled onto our paper and video discs and maybe—I don’t know—Netflix’s data centers, then it can also be said that we’re starting to have an increasingly monstrous societal nightmare.

Now, that cultural nightmare, while increasingly scary, is also becoming more beautiful and deftly created every year. With the emergence of horror genre television, the return of weird fiction, and just the general exploration of the more unthinkable aspects of life in all entertainment media, it is becoming clear that those of us who live life connected to the cultural sphere have a very close relationship to the things that would otherwise keep us up at night. It’s also a great time to be a fan of horror.

Here are my picks for most notable monsters that haunted our cultural dreams in 2014.

Penny Dreadful

Notable Monsters: Vampires, a werewolf, Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster, Dorian Grey, plague, heartbreak, the entity inside Vanessa Ives, probably a mummy
Primary Fear: We fear the monster inside of us.
Obligatory Best Of Classification: Most Exciting New TV Series

Penny Dreadful, which is my bid for most exciting new TV series of the year, is a pulpy gothic literature mashup in which the protagonists are plagued by the monsters within themselves. It’s an internal conflict that for some characters is explicit and obvious (a woman possessed by a demon, a werewolf), while for others it is poetic (Dorian Gray, Victor Frankenstein), and for a few it’s particularly nuanced (a cholera patient, a father haunted by the death of his son and the abduction of his daughter).

In Penny Dreadful the primary struggle involves a group of allies, each suppressing an inner monster, who wage war on the dark forces invading its fictional Victorian London. The most heroic action that can be taken in the show’s world is to acknowledge that you are a monster and then choose to fight monstrosity. As a viewer, this is an empowering and freeing message.

2014 was filled with myriad reasons to stand up and fight for what’s right, but for certain white, straight, and male demographics, the first step in most of those struggles was understanding one’s role in perpetuating the problem. Penny Dreadful acts as a pulp parable in this regard, showing us heroes that are well intentioned yet plagued by the fact that they contain within them some of the same evil that they are fighting.

What We Do In The Shadows

Notable Monsters: Petyr, Nick, Vladislav, Deacon, Viago (vampire roommates); Anton and his pack of werewolves
Primary Fear: It’s tough being a monster these days.
Obligatory Best Of Classification: Best Movie

The New Zealand vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, despite having very few human characters, is a variation on the same theme as Penny Dreadful, albeit more optimistic (it is a comedy). Each monster character, from the vampire roommates to the werewolf pack lead by Anton (Rhys Darby’s micromanaging alpha male), is a piece of monster history trying to live and love in modern day Wellington.

I’m including What We Do In The Shadows here not because of its ability to illustrate a major fear, but because of what it says about all the other dark and despairing feelings on this list (also it was my favorite movie of 2014). Shadows avoids taking any sort of moral stance on monsters, electing instead to say, “OK, we get it, we’re monsters. But we still have to pay rent, right?”

The Southern Reach Trilogy

Notable Monsters: Area X
Primary Fear: A world that is indifferent to us.
Obligatory Best Of Classification: Best Novel(s)

Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach trilogy of novels were all released this year, causing many readers and critics to declare the return of H.P. Lovecraft-style weird fiction. The books are an excellent experiment in narrative framing, each one changing format to keep the right things hidden to produce a premium sense of the uncanny and sublime. That said, the most remarkable aspect of VanderMeer’s trilogy is its central monster: Area X.

The Southern Reach books deal with an enemy that is difficult to comprehend. Cordoned off somewhere on the East Coast of the United States (I think), Area X is probably best described as a topographical anomaly which is creating a pristine wilderness out of our human world. It just does what it does, and if you are unlucky enough to bear the curiosity that might bring you close to Area X, it’ll do what it does to you, too. Area X would still create its perfect geography without humans, and it probably will continue to once it assimilates us all.

True to weird genre form, all three books do an excellent job of painting a picture of the unknowable. There are no answers in Area X, because answers are human. The Southern Reach trilogy uses horror and Jeff VanderMeer’s confidence to defy a reader’s lust for answers. Like a hurricane, flood, melting ice cap, or rogue asteroid, the terror of Area X is that it doesn’t require our definition to be hostile. The conflict is on a planetary scale, and we’re too small to matter. Area X will just change us and that’s something we have to accept.

Silent Hills

Notable Monsters: Lisa (ghost); talking foetus in a sink; yourself
Primary Fear: There is no escape from this nightmare we’ve created for ourselves.
Obligatory Best Of Classification: Best Video Game

The playable teaser for the upcoming video game Silent Hills, known officially as P.T., was the best video game I played all year. It’s legitimately unsettling like no game has felt, potentially ever; it tells a heartbreaking story completely through simple gameplay; and it subverts the survival horror genre in a very upsetting way. That is to say, in P.T. you have no choice but to survive.

P.T. will not let you die. In previous Silent Hill entries, I always had a sense that the characters would be better off dead than be made to face their custom-tailored punishment. Character death always felt like a sort of emotional escape hatch, even if it was only ever just a frustrating illusion (obviously death is not an option in a narrative that has your character come to the end of the game).

In P.T. there is no “game over” screen. If you are murdered by the abused-to-death ghost of your wife Lisa, you wake up trapped in the same hall. All the doors are locked, even the morbid metaphorical doors, so the only choice (other than standing still) is to keep descending those spiral hallways haunted by the sins of your past.

Review With Forrest MacNeil

Notable Monsters: @thereallisaching
Primary Fear: All meaning is created. Nothing matters.
Obligatory Best Of Classification: Best New Comedy

Review with Forrest MacNeil is the funniest new show of 2014 and a great example of how elements of horror are even invading half-hour comedies. The titular character has taken on the ambitious task of reviewing life itself on an item-by-item basis. After reviewing some of the more difficult parts of life—cocaine addiction, eating 15 pancakes, divorce, eating 30 pancakes—Forrest is confronted with the horror of reviewing the unknown.

A Twitter user named @TheRealLisaChing submitted a request that Forrest review bubble baths, but thanks to a computer glitch the intrepid critic is sent on an odyssey to the end of human meaning.

Forrest is driven temporarily insane on his quest to decipher the meaning of “There All Is Aching” (a broken up version of Lisa’s Twitter handle submitted by the non-existent @bubblebaths). It’s not long before Forrest is being treated to shock therapy, ingesting boatloads of prescription medication, and plotting an asylum escape plan with fellow inmate Emo Philips.

The positive way to look at There All Is Aching is how Forrest reviews it, before the reveal that he should have been soaking in warm, bubbly water instead of being electrically and chemically lobotomized: There All is Aching is a symbol of the struggle of our need to find meaning in randomness. When the glitch is revealed to him, though, it’s clear that no matter what we tell ourselves after experiencing the horrible chaos of the universe and surviving, it can only ever add up to, at most, a three-star experience.

Hannibal

Notable Monsters: Hannibal Lecter
Primary Fear: We are weak and don’t know what to do.
Obligatory Best Of Classification: Best. Just The Best.

So, if the world is terrible randomness and absurdly horrific, what are we to do? If you’re Abigail Hobbs in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, you do what Dr. Lecter tells you.

The second season of Hannibal is the best piece of 2014’s media I consumed all year. It’s beautiful to behold, intricately written, and does perfect justice to the modern king of monsters, Hannibal Lecter. Beauty and craftsmanship aside, the show’s second season strikes such a heartbreaking chord with its bloody climax that you feel terrifyingly weak as a human.

The entire series is a nightmare love story, and Hannibal Lecter, though not necessarily the main character, is the dark sun around which all the action orbits. He is both the prime mover and the perceived object of every main character. Whether they want revenge, like Will Graham; justice like Jack Crawford; fulfillment like Alana Bloom; or some kind of perverse vindication like Mason Verger, they all need Hannibal to tell them how to get it as the high-functioning psychopath dangles their greatest desire just out of reach.

Lecter is an anti-god, not motivated by the sadistic, but out of active curiosity and pride. Hannibal is an effective representation of our need for some sort of higher being and the fear that the one we put our faith in might be more interested in our mutilation, humiliation, and wine pairing than our actual well being.

We are all living scary lives, and the monsters we love to watch help us know our fears. Hannibal Lecter is an example of how those fears can be at once beautiful and paralyzing.

Peter Counter is a freelance pop culture and technology writer. He writes about TV and video games for Dork Shelf.

The ScreamCast: Episodes 41 – 43

You might have missed these recent installments of The ScreamCast. Now’s your chance to catch up.

Episode 41 – Silent Night Deadly Night (1984)
Includes a critique of Scream Factory’s Blu-ray release and a rundown of other holiday-themed movies.

Episode 42 – Tales From The Crypt (1972), The Vault Of Horror (1973) & Trancers (1984)
Brad, Sean, and Brian discuss the Scream Factory releases of Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror as well as Full Moon’s Trancers reissue.

Episode 43 – The Device (2014) & The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
Director John Portanova joins the crew to talk about his latest film The Device as well as Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release of The Quatermass Xperiment and a list of Top 10 Alien Abduction/Invasion flicks.

DVD Review: The Device

By Brad Henderson

Watching filmmakers and writers grow is a beautiful thing. Through the past couple of years I’ve kept my eye on a few filmmakers like Adam Wingard, Ti West, Adrián Garcia Bogliano, Eric England, and many more. As far as more recent filmmakers, I’ve been following Jeremy Berg and John Portanova. A little while ago I reviewed their directorial feature debut, The Invoking. I was highly impressed with the direction they took with The Invoking and it falls into my category of “story horror” which I’ve described in detail in the past. So when I got word of them doing another horror film, and one involving aliens, I was down.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Damned

By Brad Henderson

Every once in a while I watch a film that I enjoy quite a bit but I wouldn’t consider great or essential to see. I call these films “rainy day” films: when something is just mediocre but you can’t stop thinking or talking about it. The film may not be that great but it’s one that won’t leave you. Films like Red Hill, Home Sweet Home, No One Lives, The Colony, and Citadel are a few that I feel fall into this category. Now, I legitimately like all those films but I know a lot of people consider them “forgettable.” People throw that word around to describe films but I honestly haven’t seen forgettable films nor do I think they exist.

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