Day 311: The X-Files

While I definitely watched this show during its original airings (Seasons 2 through 6), I caught up on what I missed with home video afterwards.

For those who don't know, The X-Files is a television show about Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. These two FBI agents are assigned to a section known as The X-Files where all the strange and inexplicable cases get dumped. Mulder is trying to find proof of alien life so that he might one day locate his abducted sister, Samantha. Scully was originally assigned to the 'Files in hopes that she would debunk Mulder's work and find rational explanations for all the weirdness he kept running into. Over the years, they become allies and see all sorts of fantastical sights. There was a reunion series in 2016 with another planned soon.

There are three kinds of episodes on this show: good monster of the week, bad monster of the week and mythology episodes. Mythology episodes moved the grand plot of the show forward by digging mostly into alien abductions and shadowy government conspiracies. These are some of my favorite episodes since they push the narrative but these were almost never the scary episodes. The Monster of the Week episodes would fall outside the mythology and let Mulder and Scully investigate all sorts of paranormal phenomenon like ghosts, vampires, werewolves, etc. Again, some of my favorite episodes are comedic takes on these investigations but there are some episodes that were genuinely scary monster of the week eps. Here are a few I would recommend...

1) Ice- Season 1, Episode 8- Mulder and Scully are called into a remote Arctic research station where something has been found in ancient layers of ice. The small cast and single location allow for a tight riff on Carpenter's The Thing with no one knowing who has fallen victim to an alien parasite.

2) Darkness Falls- Season 1, Episode 20- The same formula for Ice is used in a remote logging camp where old growth trees contain ancient insects that desiccate human bodies. They only come out in the dark but the generators are running out of gas. I really like this one because of how deep in trouble Mulder and Scully get.

3) Die Hand Die Verletzt- Season 2, Episode 14- A group of Satanists are running a high school and are back to their old ways. Kind of a satire on lapsed religious folks, this is still a good example of putting the creepy into an unusual place.

4) Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose- Season 3, Episode 4- A serial killer is killing anyone who claims to be psychic. Things get interesting when Clyde Bruckman, a real psychic, gets involved in the investigation.

5) Home- Season 4, Episode 2- A group of inbred monsters pull a Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Mulder and Scully when they go to investigate the body of a baby found buried in a field. The family in this (and the cool use of music) make this a standout episode.

These are just a handful. Some of my favorites include "Drive" and "Monday" from Season 6 which seem to ape Speed and Groundhog Day to great effect. Really, the whole thing is worth watching. The mythology episodes are uniformly exciting and you can make up your own mind about the other, monsters of the week.

Day 310: The Blackwell Ghost

This was an Amazon stumble upon that caught my eye because it was categorized as an independent documentary instead of a horror movie.

This "movie" is about an hour long so it barely qualifies as a feature (back in the day, it would be a fine running length, and that day was in the 1930s). The movie stars a young producer of zombie films who has decided to go into documentary film making by tackling ghosts as his first subject. I genuinely forget the guys name and I think it is by design we might never learn it. Anyway, the director is very excited by a video he has found on youtube about a ghost trashing a hotel room. He goes so far as to get in touch with the guy who posted it to youtube and asks if it is real, to which the youtuber says, "Of course!" And then years or just months pass with no further activity until he finds some footage in an online ghost forum that he believes is real. He tracks down that poster and the guy invites him to film in his house. The director and his wife go visit the house and are invited to stay there for a weekend and film as much as they want.

The whole hook of the movie is that it is real. Beyond even the Blair Witch Project marketing, this movie is posted as a documentary on Amazon and the guy making it goes out of his way to profess everything is real. The main problem I have, and I think the key to the whole thing is that the first video he gets excited about (the hotel ghost) has already been debunked as a fake video. With the foundation exposed as false, I am pretty safe in saying the rest of the movie built on it is just as false. Still, the unnamed filmmaker does a great job blurring the lines and making you think it could be real. Part of you, as a horror fan, wants it to be. But alas...not yet, my friends.

Day 309: HP Lovecraft

Another break from movie reviewing today to talk about a giant in the horror field.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Rhode Island was an early 20th century writer who really only found fame after he died. His work is based around things that would drive someone mad. His main contribution was the Cthulu mythos in which he wrote about dark elder gods living beyond outer space that were constantly trying to claw their way into our dimension. The hapless protagonists who encounter these beings are invariably driven insane and the world seems constantly on the brink of utter decimation.

Being a prose writer, Lovecraft often described events and creatures that are beyond human understanding. This makes them very hard to draw or bring to life in a movie. As such, adaptations of Lovecraft's work have been few and far between. His work exists best as stories so here are a few I would recommend...

1) The Rats in the Walls- This is an almost Edgar Allen Poe approach to a man living in an old mansion where he hears rats in the walls every night. His explorations beneath the house show him something very different.

2) Dreams in the Witch House- A boarder inside an old house known to have belonged to a witch starts having strange dreams, discovering impossible angles in the room and having run-ins with a rat that has the face of a man. Things get weirder from there.

3) The Nameless City- A traveler in the desert finds more than he bargained for when he begins exploring a ruined, ancient city.

4) The Music of Erich Zahn- A student in a small European town befriends a violin player who has a unique view out his window. He also has a very important reason for playing his violin every night.

5) The Colour Out of Space- When something falls from the heavens, a strange blight begins to grow over a family's lands.

6) The Statement of Randolph Carter- Just what did Carter see when he went with a colleague to explore an old tomb?

7) Dagon- What horrors lurk in the middle of the ocean? A survivor of a German boat wreck in World War 1 finds out when he runs aground in a strange place.

These are just some of the stories I could recommend. Lovecraft's work is usually reliably spooky. The one downside is his horribly racist views of African Americans that taint some of the writings. If you can deal with some old timey racism, the horror is actually quite good.

Day 308: Paranormal Activity 2

I am sure I saw this in the theater because I remember someone cracking open canned drinks behind me.

After the events of the first Paranormal Activity, there didn't seem to be a lot of places to go with the narrative. This movie moves backwards in time to show that Katie's sister, Kristi, was going through a similar set of occurrences at the same time as the first movie. After what looks like a break in, Kristi and her husband install security cameras all over the house and this is where most of the action plays out. There is a nefarious space in the basement, the pool cleaner keeps getting moved in the night and the kitchen seems to be a hotbed for poltergeist activity. Throw in the endangerment of a baby and you have a recipe for a sequel that is a lot like the original, just more.

As far as these sorts of movies go, this one is slightly less effective than the first. There is no great blank space onto which the audience can project their fear of the unknown. True, the basement is out of camera range but that is hardly a substitute for the gaping doorway of the first movie. The multiple cameras and angles help create more variety of images than the first. The cuts between the cameras almost take on a rhythm so that you can tell when something crazy is about to happen, but I think that is part of the fun.

I have a lot of fun with these found footage spookhouse movies but your mileage may vary. For me, it is more about what I don't see than what I do. Others like to see their demons and ghosts in all their glory. This isn't that but it still works.

Day 307: Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I'm not sure if I first saw this as a rental or as a revival showing in Boston, but I'm glad I watched it.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of teens who decide to visit an old family grave that has fallen into disrepair and may have been vandalized. Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiker who cuts his own hand open and foretells a grim fate for them. When they kick him out of their van, he marks it with his blood. Eventually, the kids get where they are going and despite everything being run down and gross, seem to have a decent time. As two try to find some gas for their van, they run into an old house with generators running. The couple quickly fall to the actions of Leatherface, a big man wearing a face mask made of other people's faces. Things go downhill from there.

First, this movie is boldly unsympathetic towards the crippled as Franklin, confined to a wheelchair, is the most annoying character perhaps in the history of horror. His constant whining is somewhat justified as the hitchhiker tries to carve him up but still, man, have some dignity. The rest of the movie has some of the most disturbing and off-putting shots in cinema history as well. There is a cutaway in the old house of spiders just crawling all over each other that never fails to give me the creeps. The use of practical lighting (for the most part) ads to the feeling that you are watching a snuff film. There are scenes in this movie that really unnerve me. Grandpa and his ability to wield a hammer is one of the most horrific things I've ever seen. Tobe Hooper directed the shit out of this movie and it shows in every grimy frame.

If you can deal with people dying in really horrific ways and a final half hour that is nothing but screaming, you should check out this classic. For such a cheesy title, the horror is created in such original and striking ways that it will always be looked at as foundational for the genre.

Day 306: Pontypool

Definitely a Netflix watch based on an Ain't It Cool suggestion. I think it might have wandered off Netflix in the meantime but I'm not sure.

Pontypool follows three people in a radio station during the outbreak of a crisis. Stephen McHattie (poor man's Lance Henriksen) is a shock jock who has come into work despite a blizzard. His producer and his station manager are also there working. Thanks to their news copter reporter, they are slowly able to get information about what seems to be a riot breaking out around a doctor's office. Soon, there are reports of people eating and killing each other and a warning from an unknown source to avoid using the English language. The doctor makes his way to the radio station and explains that the spreading zombie apocalypse is all due to certain infected words. If you hear the right word, you become infected and either kill someone or die yourself. With the premise established, things start going wrong.

I like the originality of the idea, zombie plague via spoken words but the execution falls a little short. It is probably the budget limitations of the movie but there is a lot of telling and not showing in this (mostly from phone calls into the station). The movie is essentially a three to four hander (once the doctor shows up) and the four actors carry the weight of the material well. The only other problem I had besides the lack of visual variety was the fact that the disease is never fully explained even with the big mid-movie exposition dump. The concept is just a little too heady to be straight up horror.

If you want a new take on a stale genre, check this out. If you need things like visuals and clarity from your films, maybe skip it.

Day 305: Godzilla

I know this has recently gotten some re-releases with the Japanese only content but I have only ever seen the cut with Raymond Burr.

Godzilla is about a series of nuclear explosions awakening a giant lizard beast off the coast of Japan. As he romps and stomps his way through Tokyo, the powers that be try to determine a way to stop him. Most of the action revolves around a scientist named Yamane and his colleague, Serizawa, as one scientist who wishes to study and understand Godzilla and another scientist who has the means to kill him. Raymond Burr is a reporter named...get this, Steve Martin. He mainly gets to comment on the action as it is happening around him without directly affecting the plot.

The U.S. version is a little less heavy on the anti-bombing rhetoric (I wonder why) but essentially, the plot is identical to the original version. Science is the cause of and the solution to all the problems in the movie. There are some fun scenes where Godzilla gets to go crazy on his rampage. In between sweet Kaiju action is the requisite love story where Yamane's daughter calls off her engagement to Serizawa because she is in love with someone else. But you know, you gotta play to the whole audience, not just the city stomp appreciators.

Do you really need me to recommend this or not? You know you like it.