Not at all to be confused with last week's classy classic, this Night of the Demons is the 2009 remake of the 80s also-ran best known for popularising goth girls to the horny mind, and is the trashy peak of trashcore. Why the remake? Because the original was also trashy, but this one dials it up to 11, with more gratuitous carnage, sluttier scream queens with ludicrous silicone cans, and a soundtrack of the kind of metal you imagine methheads bang to in tin sheds. The original might have been edgy and hedonistic in its day, but with this one you can taste the spilled beer and feel the sticky floors beneath your feet. If your cinematographic palette pales at Friday the 13th levels of sleaze and gore, feel free to stick to the Universal classic monsters, but if just once a year, as the Christian lore of Halloween entails, you feel the need to let the forces of chaos and debauchery have their day, cry havoc and let spin this brain cell obliterator of a flick.
Come on guys, it'll be fun.
This Night concerns a Halloween party gone ever-so-predictably bad, set in an impressively ominous New Orleans mansion where the silent-movie-pastiche opening sequence informs us demons were once summoned and contained, waiting to rise anew and ruin everyone's festivities.
IDK what "Southern Gothic" is but I think it's this.
Our hapless protagonists are an A-Z of B-C-list scream royalty. Angela, back from the original, is played by Shannon Elizabeth, who was in the unpronounceable remake of Th13rteen Ghosts. Bobbi Sue Luther starred in Laid to Rest, which is only slightly more than you or I have ever done. Monica Keena has the unique distinction of surviving both Jason and Freddy. And Diora Baird was in the prequel to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (but also South of Heaven, which, if you take anything from this bløg, watch).
May all our T&A queens have that one actually good movie in their filmographies.
In the highest traditions of Plato and Aristotle, our heroines debate the merits of slutty vs scary costumes, mostly settling on the time-honoured cat-ears-and-cleavage formula, to disgusted looks of the I-can't-buh-lieve-she's-wearing-the-same-outfuht? genre.
Sadly this scene does not end with them ripping each other's clothes off and some guy in a Bob Hope costume saying to camera "now that's what I call a catfight".
Meanwhile there's some plot nonsense in which Edward Furlong (rehab) tries to amass enough from street-level dope slinging to pay off an hilarious Bri'ish gangster (Nawlins in this flick is 90% white and the criminal underworld is run by fucking cockneys. I leave it to you to decide who gets to be pissed off at that; I just thought it was funny).
The bartender's Manson costume is a neat detail.
Well one thing leads to another, as things tend to do. Cops raid the party, the stragglers play spin the bottle (everyone in the cast is at least a decade too old for this but who cares), the demons awake but no one notices, and Angela gives us a new rendition of her famous dance, in which she lezzes out with Luther.
Homosexuals will never understand the profound straightness of hot girls kissing.
If anything the movie loses steam as the party shenanigans give way to demons murdering everyone, but the tone remains breezy throughout. Within a line or two of dialogue between Keena and the lead demon, Keena manages to switch from fearful to blasé as though everyone on set just forgot the tone of the scene between takes, but who cares? We know she's going to become an action heroine because she's Monica Keena, she already beat the top two stars of the genre in the same movie, and by that point there's no one else left to be the Final Girl anyway.
A decade and a half of studios trying to force iconic girlboss characters obliterated by a single still of Monica Keena on an average day.
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.
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
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.
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.
