Movie Halloween Presents: Tormented!

This Halloween's featured kinograph is 1960's misunderstood ghost classic Tormented! (1960), by B-movie folktale Bert I. Gordon, of whom I had never heard but who apparently had quite the reputation for giant creature features, which, coupled with his initials, lent him the enviable moniker Mr B.I.G (no relation to The Notorious).

OK so I added the ! but it should have an !.

Tormented! concerns the misadventures of jazz pianist Tom (Richard Carlson, Creature From The Black Lagoon), who at the opening of our kinographeme attempts to break off his affair with Vi (Juli Reding, Tormented!) so he can marry Meg (Trevalene Lugene Sanders (really)), whom we are to learn is loaded, whereas Vi is merely front-loaded.

Fat stacks or stacked fat: which is best in life? #teamvi

Vi demonstrates correct health and safety procedure for leaning on rusty railings in abandoned lighthouses no one ever bothers to lock up.

Vi threatens Tom with blackmail but then fortuitously falls off the rickety lighthouse, barely hanging onto a rail. Tom is faced with a dilemma: should he save her, even at the cost of risking his imminent marriage?

Denied! (1960).

Carlson's body language in this scene is my favourite ever because he's so clearly unenthusiastic about even trying to save her from the get-go, so when he withdraws his hand at the crucial moment I can imagine him being like "psych!". Nevertheless he feels bad about it the next day, when he retrieves her body from the waves only to see it turn to seaweed before his eyes.

Despite being achieved by dumping seaweed on Ms Reding, this is quite effective due to quick dissolves and the suddenness of it.

Was it a ghost, or his imagination all along? From hence until forth, Tom will be Tormented! (1960), or, more properly, Annoyed! (1960), because Vi's ghost mostly bothers him by doing stuff like playing records, before escalating to dismembering her ghostly body and spreading it around the house.

The effects are surprisingly good until you cut to the reverse angle and he's just holding a mannequin head.

Vi's head taunts Tom that he will inevitably screw up in the coverup to which he has committed himself, and he starts to unravel further as he is questioned by the ferryman who brought Vi to the island, who is a beatnik who calls everyone "dad", which gives you an idea what hip zoomer slang of 2020 will sound like to subsequent generations.

"Dig this hep-cat daddy-o made in the shade. Based? Cringe." - this character. Incidentally, this actor later played the bartender in The Shining.

Without revealing the ending, I encourage you to watch this movie, which I believe is in the public domain and is all over YouTube in uploads of varying quality. Though featured on Mystery Reddit Theatre 3000, it would be a mistake to dismiss this as a corny B-joint, and I feel this undeserved fate has befallen it because it went all in on the ghost angle. The opening scenes feel more like a film noir - there's even a brief voiceover, and the Tormented! (1960) jazz musician reminds me of the Bill Pullman character from Lost Highway - and I suspect if the rest of the movie had proceeded in this vein, with Vi's manifestations relegated to Tom's paranoid imagination, it would be the respected cult classic it should be. The plot wouldn't even really have to change that much. But of course then we wouldn't have such highlights as Vi's talking head and the blind woman ill-advisedly ascending the lighthouse to give the spirit a much-needed talking to.

Look out! I mean uh

On the dreamy strength of the early scenes alone, I would give Tormented! 5 stars out of 5, and while it arguably fails to live up to its full potential, it has so much personality that I refuse to dock so much as half a star. Watch Tormented! today.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Remake!

Connoisseurs of my blogge will know the Nightmare on Elm Street series is particularly close to my heart, and 2020 marks the ten-year anniversary of the profitable but little-loved remake. To its dubious credit, the 2010 film reinstates Freddy's original status as a pedo who molested kids, changed to a child killer in the 1984 classic to avoid accusations of capitalising on a contemporary news story. The writers allude to the true events shamefully covered up as "satanic panic" in the 80s regarding molestation in daycares involving dark rituals and underground tunnels, which was all confirmed true by recent leaks, which is pretty bold for an obligatory horror remake of its time.

Tina is named "Kris" this time. Kris-tina. Nancy is also renamed from Thompson to Holbrook, maybe because they didn't want to bum everyone out by saying the Nancy and Tina we all know and love got fucking raped by a pedophile.

Sadly that is the only praise due the remake, except to say that it perfectly illustrates everything not to do in a remake, thus giving us a whole new appreciation for the original.

Original Freddy actor Robert Englund shares a useful insight about the kids being too downbeat and depressive from the start, lacking any semblance of a dynamic arc. It would be much more frightening to watch a happy, sunny façade slowly crumble as the realisation of their dark past takes over. Showing a happy, normative status quo would also establish stakes - meaningful lives they are afraid to lose, and something to fight for. These kids are emo from the start, reminding of Rob Zombie's misguided conviction in his Halloween remakes that horror fans will relate to edgy losers, which is technically correct but actually wrong because horror movies are a form of escapism that allow us to vicariously experience actually wanting to live.

I felt a whole lot worse for the Breakfast Club up top when they bought it than doomer boi and doomer girl here.

Even the protagonists' relationships with peripheral characters are underdeveloped. Remember how, in the original, Nancy's relationship with her mother becomes increasingly strained - she drinks because of her dark secret, she puts the bars on the windows, and in the end Nancy becomes her carer, putting her to bed in a role reversal (thematically intended, as confirmed by Craven on the commentary). In the remake the mom has no particular character quirks and disappears from the story after dispensing the bare minimum of plot information. A much thinner and weaker character and relationship!

There are other problems too. The filmmakers failed to do anything interesting with the new technology. The original film was limited in many ways but made a virtue of its limitations - compare the very effective practical effect of Freddy leaning through the wall to the horribly ugly and cartoonish looking CGI effect in the remake.

In 26 years we went from the above kinography to this PS1-looking POS.

There are not even interesting vignettes, as the dream sequences simply remix and recycle familiar elements from the original out of context. The knived glove reaching up out of the bathtub - in the original it leads to Freddy pulling her under. In the remake it leads to nothing. Tina in the body bag - in the original Nancy follows her out of class and down into the boiler room, where she burns her arm and discovers an important plot point - that her injuries carry over into her waking life. In the remake it leads to nothing.

Since pre-burn Freddy wasn't even a murderer in the new version, there is no reason at all for him to even have the glove of knives. Maybe he saw the original on TV and copied it.

Even the dialogue follows this pattern, with lines taken from previous films stripped of the context that made them work. Before killing Freddy, ""Nancy"" says  "now you're in my world, bitch!" - a line used by Monica Keena's character in Freddy Vs Jason. But in FvsJ it served a thematic purpose - she was reversing Freddy's "bitch" catchphrase that he had used several times throughout the film. In the remake he has no "bitch" lines so it comes out of nowhere and sounds ridiculous. She might as well have said "now you're in my world, gaylord!"

In seven years we went from a coherent screenplay to Kate Mara's autistic sister breaking out in Xbox Live bantz.

Even Freddy's first appearance is completely uninteresting. Consider how New Nightmare slowly built him up over its first half, showing him only briefly or at a distance, leading to a big moment when he finally appears right in-your-face. In the remake he's just...there, within the first few minutes.

My reaction to this was literally "oh".

There are none of the wonderfully surrealistic dream world sets like the ruined church of part 4 or the Escher-inspired maze of staircases in part 5. The dream world is flat and ordinary. What a wasted opportunity!

"Um, don't you think this is a little too cool and fun?" - producer

In fact the remake seems to waste every possible opportunity to do anything interesting with the material. The trailer contained footage that never appeared in the final cut, like a pool party and Freddy in a monk-like robe. Why was this footage excised, when watered-down, lame rehashes of scenes from the original were left intact? And this leads us to the basic problem with remakes in general:

If a remake is too close to the original, then it becomes redundant. If it is too different, it risks alienating fans. A good balance was struck in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre - it used similar scenes and devices at points, but put a twist on them, such as switching the hitchhiker from a villain to a prior victim. This kept it feeling fresh and unpredictable even for fans of the original. The Elm Street remake does not get this balance right at all.

2bh TCM '03 was metal af and better than the original, not even sorry.

It's unlikely that there's an interesting future for this property, but if another remake is ever greenlit I hope they take the plot and characters from one of the weaker sequels or even use elements from the Freddy's Nightmares TV show or spinoff comics. Imagine Freddy's Dead, but serious and good, with Silent Hill vibes. That would have been sweet.