Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mothman Prophecies!

Cryptid flicks might well be the most bargain-bin of all genres. Abominable was a neat riff on Hitchcock that memorably featured Tiffany Shepis being yanked spine first through a (rear) window, and Willow Creek was a top shelf Blair Witch Project ripoff that did little to disguise its plagiarism. But you've never heard of either, and it's way downhill from there on in, with one remarkably kino exception.

We're going uncharacteristically classy this Halloween.

What makes The Mothman Prophecies go so hard is the effortlessness with which it transcends its lowly underdog status as cryptidcore. If such cryptozoological heavyweights as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot can barely scrape together more than one watchable title, who would have thought the fucking Mothman movie would be any good?

The schizo art coffee table book market remains sadly underserved.

Yet Prophecies is not content to meet us halfway with a blend of gory shlock and the odd good scene thrown in as a treat. From start to finish, it's a slickly shot and edited, oddly philosophical mood piece, taking the 1960s sightings of a winged, mysterious creature and the book from which it takes its title as a springboard to delve into realms of atmospheric kino more akin to David Lunch's oneiric ouevre than your average horror fare. Richard Gere stars as the everyman drawn into the rabbit-hole of Mothman lore by a fateful encounter that leaves him with questions and traumatic memories and troubled dreams. Laura Linney is the local cop who introduces him to the Mothman witnesses in the town of Point Pleasant, WV. In the movie's most audacious twist, the West Virginians themselves are not portrayed as the monsters.

Average West Virginian according to average Californian (Wrong Turn, 2003)

But I shall say no more about the plot because it's the atmosphere and visual style that retain their brooding impact. Questions linger. Closeups portend. Airborne cameras circle. Electric lights suggest.

A bird's eye view...or something else???

If you want a beer & popcorn flick for Halloween, you have a string of options, from the enjoyably retarded to the great. If you're alone and want to ponder the cosmological nature of the unknowable, watch The Mothman Prophecies.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Lifeforce!

If random stills from your movie don't look like Frazetta paintings, you are doing it wrong.

As we've discussed previously, vampires have been played out for a long time. Lifeforce (1985), directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), however, neatly sidestepped the clichés and pitfalls by reframing the vampire as an extraterrestrial shapeshifter which hacks the Jungian depths of human psychology by posing as a naked hottie to extract the precious Lifeforce (1985) from unwary man.

Me when a random 7 smiles at me bc she thinks I'm learning disabled.

Steve Railsback (not a porn name) plays the hapless astronaut who alone survives the wreck of the spaceship Churchill (for this movie is set in Bri'ain) to find himself forever bonded to the vampiress (Mathilda May) who stalks the streets of Merrie Englande in the buff. Though the bravura opening sequence is set in spehss, to anyone unfamiliar with Bri'ish TVkino Yes, Minister (and it's diminishing-returns sequel Yes, Prime Minister), it's 1980s Bri'ain that makes for the more offputtingly alien setting. Fortunately our un-dead Stacy makes short work of most of that unfortunate country.

Neat detail: Thotsferatu has cool spiral eyes.

SAS Colonel Colin Caine (Peter Firth) enlists Railsback to track down the spehss vampiress in much the same way half-bitten Mina helps track down Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, but in Lifeforce the vampires can body-hop like Jason in The Final Friday, so this section of the movie leads us on a merry dance around the soggy Bri'ish countryside and a sanitarium run by Patrick Stewart (Star Trek The Next Generation), who engages in Exorcistesque shenanigans as he channels the exhibitionistic vampire chick.

Young Patrick Stewart reacts to Old Patrick Stewart making Picard (Currentyear+whatever the fucc)

This chews up much of the second act before being handwaved away as mostly the distraction it is, before we plunge headfirst into the borderline non-sequitur that is the third act, in which London becomes overrun by zombies, causing explosions somehow.

Mostly Peaceful Protest or football hooligans? Hugh D. Syde!

But, like all trve kvlt KNHOs, we're not here for a coherent plot, but for the experience. The best way to describe Lifeforce is like if 2001-era Kubrick directed a Heavy Metal segment. The slick widescreen photography, random fish-eye lenses and frequent left-turns into bad-trip psychedelia make this easily the best 2001 pastiche since Star Trek The Motion Picture, while the visual effects by John Dykstra leave most of its contemporaries in the dust. Sadly audiences in 1985 overlooked this gem so now you have to watch Captain Thormerica and the Wasp 2: Multiverse of Gayness every year.

Nooo my worst fear: sex with a beautiful woman. I'm going insaaane nooo

Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th: The Remake!

The 2000s were particularly overrun with horror remakes, most of which were terrible. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had a neat visual style everyone else later ripped off, and 2009's Night of the Demons was a fun spin on an overhyped original. But other than that it was one disappointment after another, except that no one had any expectations for horror remakes, so more accurately it was just one turd after another. The Nightmare on Elm Street remake managed to make the surreal world of dreams boring and prosaic (something not even the astoundingly awful Freddy's Dead did) and the Rob Zombie Halloweens were just a too-long look into the tiny imagination of a grown man who wears Hot Topic shirts.

But fortunately, based Friday the 13th is immune to the normal desecration implied in a remake, partly because every Friday the 13th movie after the first was essentially a remake with one added gimmick (Jason, 3D, being the last one, Scooby Doo Jason, Zombie Jason, Jason Vs Carrie, Jason Takes Manhattan, being the last one, space, and Freddy, respectively). In this one, the gimmick is that it's 2009, and film as an artform is essentially on life support (it's since died), so why not remake an unremakeable film?

You can't really tell but he has hair this time.

The first scene is the end of the original film, and unnecessarily clears up that Jason wasn't drowned at all and saw his mother go on a killing spree and get beheaded. Not that it matters, but I liked the ambiguity in the original series, and I always preferred to think he really drowned. But whatever, this is the remake so they can do what they like.

We then flash forward to the present, except it's 2009 so paradoxically we actually flash forward to the past. For 2000s kids, this is what will have to pass for nostalgia.

This image has been censored for nudity.

So this chick with the frightening bolt-on tits and her friends get sliced up by Jason after stumbling into his weed field because Jason is a stoner in the remake. The only survivor of the massacre is Whitney, whom Jason spares and imprisons in his underground tunnels because she looks like his mom, I think, except not how he'd remember her but OK.

Then Whitney's brother comes looking for her, running into a new batch of walking corpses including a guy who keeps insisting he's unlikeable to the point that I like him out of spite. I forget his name but I'll call him Brad because it's probably something like that. Remember when Tucker And Dale Vs Evil called their evil Chad guy Chad? That's what is known in writing as "on the nose" which means it's too apropos. It makes you look actually bitter you're not a Chad instead of being funny. Whatever, I'm Team Brad for this movie.

Based Brad.

Meanwhile Jason comes across a man who has an intimate relationship with a mannequin, and kills him. In the man's house, sack-wearing Jason (the Part 2 component of the remake) finds a hockey mask, so he wears the hockey mask instead. This is what's known as the origin story of the hockey mask, but it's so half-assed and no one cares where the hockey mask came from anyway, so the scene just stands out as being really self-conscious for no reason.

"At last I have a mask with which to strike terror this Friday the 13th: The Remake" - Jason

I mention this because the writing team are the same guys who wrote Freddy Vs Jason, and have spoken a couple of times about things they wrote that got changed around, so maybe they had a more elaborate story planned for the mask but even that is distressing to me because it would mean they thought the mask was in itself important, as opposed to just being something J-Dog wears because he's self-conscious about his appearance because he's mentally a child. Then I realise I'm actually thinking about story and character in a Friday the 13th flick, and I wonder whether if I weren't like this I might have been an engineer or an astronaut or something gay like that.

One of the things the writers mentioned that got switched around later was this girl's death: she was originally meant to slowly drown because she was too scared to swim for shore while Jason was standing there watching her. This would have been a great and very different way to kill someone off. It could have been really sad and dark and exploited deep-seated fears people have about the water and the wilderness. Instead she just gets stabbed through the head, which is so unmemorable that until I rewatched the remake for this article, I had thought they actually did the drowning scene. A scene I never saw was more memorable, but was cut. This type of decision blows my tiny mind.

Team Brad has the best pitsluts.

There follows an inexplicably lengthy secks scene, featuring this semen demon played by Julianna Guill and best boi Brad the douche, intercut with NPCs dying left, right and centre, to which Brad and Stacy are probably unintentionally funnily oblivious. The fact that Brad alone - whom we're supposed to dislike - gets to smash before dying makes me wonder whether the writers changed their minds and became Team Brad during the second draft or something. Don't get me wrong, this is a Christian blög and sex is for marriage, but it's just weird in a good way to see wanton celebration of normative heterosexuality in a movie anymore. Expect the next remake to feature two beanmouthed xirs scissoring through a hole in a sheet.

Finally Jason shows up to kill everyone and Whitney's brother finds her and blah blah blah who cares. Friday the 13th isn't about resolution. It's about moments. It's about the clouds crossing the moon like in Un Chien Andalou, and ominous dreams about raining blood, and strip monopoly, and the sadness of wasted youth. If you're a tryhard film snob who thinks the original is some bullshit slasher, watch it back to back with the remake, and then kill yourself. The remake is everything it needed to be, but it only highlights what we've lost as a culture, and it was all downhill from here. One day, if it survives the cultural revolution, our descendants will look back at this one and feel that same loss.