Scary Movie

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) is an interesting case - vintage (non-camp) hippy horror. 

Jessica, played by Zohra Lampert, has just been released from a mental institution. Her husband Barton Heyman and his long-haired friend Kevin O'Connor are driving her to their new home in rural Connecticut in their bitchin' hearse. They stop in a graveyard so she can make a rubbing of a gravestone, and she sees a mysterious figure in white. But she doesn't mention it because she assumes it is a hallucination and she doesn't want to go back to the institution.

Their new house is a fog-shrouded old mansion that the locals all shun. They shun our friends as well, because they are dirty hearse-driving hippies. In the house, Jessica again sees a fleeting figure, but this time, the guys see it too. It turns out to be Gretchen Corbett, a pretty red-headed drifter who is squatting there. She promises to move on, but they invite her to stay for dinner. O'Connor seems taken with her, which Jessica likes, but so does her husband, which makes the voices in head jealous. Nonetheless, she gets the gang to invite her to stay on indefinitely.

But weird stuff is happening. The woman in white appears underwater when Jessica is swimming and tries to pull her under. Later, this figure shows her the corpse of the town's antique dealer below a dam, but it's gone when she tries to show people. It looks like she's cracking up again, and the more it looks like that, the worse the voices get.

Then she notices all the people in town with bites or scratches. And she finds a very old family portrait that seems to include Corbett. An ancestor? Or is Corbett a vampire?

The whole "Is the house haunted or is she crazy" theme comes from The Innocents, of course, but it plays very well here. The look at a group of people who left New York for the peace of country life and found trouble is bit more original. Living as a group, inviting in squatters, farming. Although they aren't organic at all - O'Connor sprays a ton of poison on the orchard. It's funny that poisoned apples aren't used as a theme at all.

Due to the title, I sort of thought that this was going to be a Diabolique situation. SPOILER - it wasn't.

Edward Gunhands

Calling Guns Akimbo (2020) a horror movie is kind of stretching things. It's gory enough, and there's a bit of body horror, but I mainly queued it up because it looked like fun. Stupid fun.

The movie sets up the premise quickly: An underground fight club/most dangerous game called Skizm is live streaming death matches. It becomes insanely popular, with everyone watching it, especially when Samara Weaving is competing and killing. Daniel Radcliffe is a regular shlub who works at a computer gaming company and has a beautiful Instagram model (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) as an ex-girlfriend. In his spare time, he likes to troll message boards, and is pretty good at it. So good that he gets the leader of the Skizm crew, Ned Dennehy, mad at him. Dennehy is a skinny older psycho with a face full of crude tattoos. This won't be good.

So Radcliffe is attacked, beaten, and drugged. When he wakes up, he finds two guns bolted to his hands. I mean bolted right through the palm and out the back, with each finger screwed down as well. He has also been entered into a death match, versus the ever-victorious Weaving.

But first he has to figure out how to pee with guns for hands - without shooting anything off.

He goes to the police, but they just see a guy with two guns, and tase him - which causes him to involuntarily fire, killing one of the cops. He runs to his ex-girlfriend, who doesn't want to get involved. He goes to his office, but all he gets is grief from his obnoxious boss - until he starts waving his guns around. Then Weaving shows up and shoots up the place. The only person who is at all helpful is the homeless loony Rhys Darby, who gives him something to eat - which of course he has to feed him by hand.

So the first couple of acts are a series of fast-paced chases and shoot-em-ups. At some point, Radcliffe is going to have to stop reacting and somehow fight back. How it all wraps up isn't exactly clever, or particularly character driven. But it work well enough - better than if he suddenly becomes a crack shot.

Well, I wasn't expecting it to be clever, I was expecting it to be stupid. I don't think you could function for long with guns bolted to your hands. Not even stapled. I don't think you could pull the triggers. But at least in the end, he doesn't get the girl. His ex stays ex, although she may dine out on having known him when.

Other People's Probems

 The Others (2001) looked like just another haunted house movie, and worse, one with kids. For a while, I had it as a backup movie for our month of Spooktober. But a random comment about the movie, and maybe Nicole Kidman in the starring role changed my mind.

It starts with Kidman waking up screaming - just a nightmare, never mentioned. She is living in a mansion shrouded in fog on the island of Jersey just after WWII. There is a knock on the door, and she assumes the party knocking are answering her ad for servants. The previous servants just vanished one night - "And were never seen again," says Kidman, not the least bit ominous. The new servants are Fionnula Flanagan, an old gardener, Eric Sykes, and a mute girl, Elaine Cassidy. (Odd side note: I just mentioned Flanagan in this blog.) 

Kidman explains to this new crew that there are 14 doors in this house, and each one must be locked before the next is opened. She has two children who are extremely photosensitive. If they are exposed to any light stronger than an oil lamp, they could die. So that explains a little bit about why she is so tightly wound. Also, her husband was a pilot in the war (Jersey was German occupied) and never came back. 

The kids are a young boy who sees ghosts and an older sister who likes to tell him ghost stories. Kidman is pretty strict with them, and feeds them lots of Bible stories. The kids are kind of over this, laughing at the story of children who refused to renounce Jesus and were martyred. They say they would just lie about it. When Kidman tries to tell them that is wicked, they agree and recant. They are, of course, lying.

Kidman begins to hear sounds, crying, stomping and so forth, even someone playing the piano. Since she keeps all the doors locked, she can't figure out what's going on. We hear the servants talk about some graves, and hiding them for now. But when Kidman demands the keys from them at shotgun-point and kicks them out, they decide to let her figure it out.

SPOILER - She, the kids, the servants, all ghosts, haunting the house. The ghosts she hears and the kids see are the new owners of the house, the living. But they won't be living there long, because the house is plainly haunted.

I enjoyed this a lot, although I kind of anticipated the twists (actually, I guessed several twists, but not all of them actually happened). Although Kidman's character wasn't very likable, when she starts storming through the house with her shotgun and rosary, well, it's pretty cool. Also, her husband shows up out of the fog, and he's Christopher Eccleston. He stays a night and vanishes again. But nobody seems to mind much or expect anything different. 

Invisible Touch

I had sort of forgotten that Leigh Whannel had released The Invisible Man (2020). But once I remembered, I queued it right up.

It starts in an expensive modern bedroom, where Elisabeth Moss is laying awake next to Oliver Jackson-Cohen (although we barely see him - hint). After checking his bedside water glass to make sure he drank the drugged water, she starts to sneak out of the house. She makes it to the Uber, but Jackson-Cohen comes out of the house screaming, and she barely makes it away.

She stays with her friend, police detective Aldis Hodge (Leverage) and his teen daughter Storm Reid (Don't Let Go). She's shell-shocked, desperate to avoid being found by her abuser. So when her sister shows up, she is very upset. What if Jackson-Cohen has her followed? No problem, says sis - he's dead.

In fact, it turns out that he left everything to Moss, as long as she stays out of trouble. Clouds are beginning to lift. Or are they? Moss is noticing odd sounds and things like a small kitchen fire. But it's probably just the trauma. 

Or did Jackson-Cohen fake his death and design an invisibility suit? After all, he was CEO of an optics company. One night when she's alone, she becomes sure of it, dumping coffee grounds on the floor to check for footprints, and finally dumping paint on something - the Invisible Man! Of course, no one believes her. She sneaks into his house and finds another suit, which she carefully hides.

Then one day she is at a restaurant with her sister, who believes Moss wanted her dead (more of Jackson-Cohen's manipulation). Relations between them have started to thaw, when a knife moves under its own power, slits sister's throat and jumps into Moss' hand. Nobody is going to believe her story about this one.

This is an interesting framing of the Invisible Man story - from the point of view of a woman who has been abused, manipulated and gaslit. Because Moss runs away from Jackson-Cohen at the start, then him dying, he does sort of seem invisible in his own movie. It also makes him a monster - one of the problems with the base story is: Why does being invisible make you evil? What about if you start out that way?

Whannel does an unusually fine job on directing, getting a lot out of the modern mansion, luxurious and cold, plus filled with surveillance. He does some interesting things with atmosphere, killing the background music and letting the camera linger, looking for someone who isn't there - or is he? There's a scene where he holds on an empty kitchen for an uncomfortable amount of time, with no jump scare at the end. 

He gets great performances from Moss, Hodge, and Reid, although some of that might be just casting the right people and getting out of their way. Moss is both beaten down and terrified, but with an inextinguishable core of courage. The twists in last act are good, in my opinion, especially the last one. (Spoiler - she does to him what he did to her sister, and gets it on tape). And it sets up a great sequel, The Invisible Woman. 

Never Sleep

Another episode of stuff we hadn't seen yet, even though it's our kind of thing: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1953). We did see the 1978 remake when it came out, but mostly because of Jerry Garcia's banjo.

It starts with Dr. Whit Bissel calling in Dr. Mel Cooley (Richard Deacon) to consult about a raving madman. The madman, Kevin McCarthy is trying to warn the world, and tells his tale in flashback.

He has just come back to the small So Cal town of Santa Mira from a trip, and his nurse tells him he has a lot of patients waiting - patients who won't say what their problem is. But all of them cancel before coming in.

His old flame, Dana Wynter, is back in town from jetsetting around, and they tentatively start up their old relationship. And why not? They are both divorced and she always seems to be wearing cocktail dresses. She's upset because her cousin seems to think her uncle, an ordinary guy who raised her, is not her uncle. She thinks he's a perfect replica, with all his memories and mannerisms - but it isn't him.

It turns out that a lot of people have this same delusion - but a little while later most of them say that it was nothing. But when McCarthy and Wynter are hanging out with their friends King Donovan and Carolyn Jones (Morticia!), they discover a pod that contains a half-formed body - that looks a lot like Donovan.

They quickly figure out that somehow, perfect replicas are being formed in giant seed pods. When you fall asleep, they replace you. Not sure how this works - it seems like they take over your brain in your old body, so why do they need the spares? Oh well. 

This is all shown with great economy. It clearly establishes the small town locale, but gets to the pods within about 20 minutes. The whole thing is over in 80 minutes. Director Don Siegel keeps things moving along and lets the paranoia build. You could not fall asleep if you want to stay human, so everyone gets a little frazzled. In one of the final scenes, McCarthy kisses Wynter, and you can feel, just like he does, that she has fallen asleep and been taken over - she's no longer human. You can see the spark go out of her eyes. 

The studio forced a happy ending, and I was actually glad. Otherwise, it would be just too much.

World War B

Funny enough, I'd never seen The War of the Worlds (1953) or it's later incarnations, including radio plays. Reason enough to queue it up for Horrorween.

It starts with Sir Cedric Hardwicke giving a tour of the Solar System, illustrated by space artist Chesley Bonestell. He lets us know that Mars is a dying planet, and the inhabitants picked Earth as their new home. Soon, meteors are landing all over. In particular, in Southern California, near where nuclear scientist Gene Barry (Burke's Law) is fishing with some fellow scientists. After they and some local Army men poke at it a little, they put it under guard. I swear, if it hadn't been so hot, they probably would have licked it.

Anyway, a hatch in the meteor unscrewed, and out came a cute little flying metal manta ray, with a cobra head and a heat ray. This little fellow started killing everything around it, including a nice old pastor trying to reason with it. This sets up Barry as protector for his niece, Ann Robinson.

The Martians land all over the world, giving director Byron Haskin and particularly producer George Pal to destroy some miniatures and use some stock footage. Our weapons are powerless against them, and the world seems lost. Then, a miracle - you know the rest.

If you like 1950s scifi, you'll probably like this - I do and I did. It isn't great, but a lot of fun, especially Gene Barry's stolid cheesiness. Best of all for you MST3K fans, his character is named Dr. Clayton Forrester - first in a long line of mad scientists!

Juan for the Money

Juan of the Dead (2012) is another one of Ms. Spenser's choices. A Cuban zombie comedy.

It starts with our hero Juan (Alexis Diaz de Villegas) and his sidekick Lazaro (Jorge Molina) fishing on a crude raft in the Bay of Havana. They reel in a corpse, which is bad enough, but it comes back to life and starts attacking them. Lazaro shoots it through the head with a spear gun and they think no more about it.

Juan doesn't seem to do much except fish and fool around with women. They are friends with an outrageous transvestite La China (Jazz Villa) and her enormous boyfriend El Primo. Lazaro tries to be a father to his grownup son Vladi California (Andros Perugorria), a handsome blond surfer looking dude, but he just wants to chase girls and do petty crimes. Juan has a daughter, Camila (Andrea Doro), who is young, beautiful and cultured, and of course wants nothing to do with her deadbeat dad - she has been living with Mom in Miami.

It soon becomes clear that the zombie in the bay wasn't a one off. More and more Cubans are becoming ravenous undead beasts. Juan thinks they are likely capitalist dissidents, like the government is always talking about. And he has a plan.

The plan is to start a zombie eradication company, Juan of the Dead - "We Kill Your Loved Ones". His daughter is disappointed at his lack of civic spirit so he does some community training as well. But things don't look so good, and get worse.

This is fun in a lot of ways. Diaz de Villagas has a worn hangdog face that's ideal for this kind of humor. There are plenty of dark jokes (fair amount of friendly fire) and some tributes to Bruce Lee, etc. Some of the shots seemed a little amateurish or cheap, but heck, this is director Alejandro Brugués second feature, and it was pretty cheap. 

Maybe not as great as, say, Sean of the Dead, but a lot of fun.

Daily Grind

We finally decided to watch Grindhouse: Planet Terror (2007), and I don't know why we waited. As I'm sure you know, Grindhouse was a double bill B-movie extravaganza, with one movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, and this one by Robert Rodriguez.

It starts with stripper Rose McGowan quitting her job and getting stuck at a lonesome BBQ joint run by Jeff Fahey. By coincidence, her old boyfriend, Freddy Rodriguez (no relation) comes by in his "Wray's Wreckage" truck - but his friends call him "El Raye". 

Meanwhile, a bunch of soldiers led by civilian (?) Bruce Willis are picking up a mysterious gas from Naveen Andrews. When it goes sideways and some one is about to get their balls chopped off, that someone releases the gas, and everyone starts going crazy and eating each other. Seems bad.

Meanwhile again, Dr. Josh Brolin and his cold wife Marley Shelton are on the night shift at the hospital. They begin to notice people coming in with scratches that become necrotic as the patients become aggressive and bitey. 

Eventually McGowan gets a scratch on her leg and has to come in to get it amputated. If you've seen the poster, you know that eventually she gets a machine gun prosthetic. 

This is a good old-fashioned stupid gore fest. And by old-fashioned I mean the film is scratched and there's a reel missing (handy for "With a leap they were free" cliffhanger solutions). There is a trailer and the classic "Our Feature Presentation" bumper. The trailer was for Machete, which looked so good, they actually made it. 

So, a total ball. Freddy makes a great hero - just a working stiff with an ex-stripper ex-girlfriend who busts his chops, but he steps up when he needs to. Also, he is a firearms expert who never misses - and the police won't let him have a gun for most of the movie. In fact, they cuff him for about the first half. McGowan is a stripper with a lot of useless talents that actually come in handy. The Brolin/Shelton subplot was maybe more than we needed, and I have no idea what we were supposed to think of Fahey's BBQ. Everyone said it was the best in Texas, but no one would touch it. Except maybe the zombies.

Also, Bruce Willis is not in most of the movie, so it's even got that going for it.

Should we watch the other half of the double bill. Deathproof? I think we like Rodriguez more thar we like Tarantino.

Normal Pair

Although I am the Queue Master, I do let Ms. Spenser have some input, especially during OctoBoo. And speaking of found footage, she suggested Paranormal Activity (2007).

PA is about a young couple. He (Micah Sloat) has just bought a fancy video camera, partly just because it's a fun toy. But she (Katie Featherston) has been haunted since childhood by a mysterious presence, and he thinks he might be able to detect something with the camera. So he sets it up in the bedroom to monitor the house while they sleep.

Katie invites a psychic over, and he says he thinks it isn't a ghost, but a demon. This calls for a whole different skill set. He recommends a demonologist, but Micah doesn't take it seriously and won't call. Meanwhile the camera is picking up a few things while they sleep. It starts with little things - noises, a door swinging, but gets more and more scary. 

As Micah discovers these things reviewing the tapes, his attitude is more, hey cool, than oh shit. He shouts at the demon, asks what it wants, and suggests they use a Ouija board to contact it. The psychic specifically said no Ouija boards - that's just inviting the demon in. So what does Micah do?

Of course, things get worse and worse, and they call the demonologist - who is out of the country for the week. They call the psychic back, and he won't even go into the house, due to the bad vibes. And then things get really scary.

It's interesting what you can do with a camcorder and a couple of characters. Some of the shots and styles of this movie are now kind of cliches - like the fast forward scenes of the couple in bed, until something spooky happens. But it's also kind of a good story: Katie and Micah have moved to Santa Barbara from Nebraska, maybe so she can get away from her troubled past. He is a day-trader, rich enough to buy a big house and expensive electronics. He is also kind of a dick, not taking Katie's fear seriously (also trying to get her to make a sex tape). 

However, I don't buy one of the central premises of the movie: that trying to film demons causes them to become more bold and present. I thought that trying to record them made them shy. Or is that only ghosts?

Mountains of Madness

We saw a preview for Devil's Pass (2013), and Ms. Spenser said that she loves Arctic horror - or in this case, Ural mountain horror. So we queued it up for Horrorween.

It's set up as a documentary about an incident (real-life) where several Russian climbers died at a pass in the Ural mountains. Or maybe it's found footage, from the attempt to make a documentary. Anyway, a group of college kids are studying the "Dyatlov Pass" incident, and decide to go to Russia and make a documentary about it. They have the leaders, male and female, sexy sound girl (chosen by smarmy leader for her looks), and two student climbers, who had summited all over the US and the rest of the world. After a few treks in snowshoes, they are ready for Russia. 

Actually, you get the feeling they are totally NOT ready for Russia, and it will kill them. And you might be ok with that.

They get to Russia, and look for the surviving member of the original party, who was committed to an asylum. The guards don't let them in - they never bothered to like make an appointment - and tell them the guy is dead. But they see someone holding a sign up in the window. Too bad they don't read Cyrillic.

And so on. They get to the mountain, and surprisingly, that's not what gets them killed. In fact they make it to the pass days early, for some weird reason. Also, all of their navigational equipment is going haywire. Then they find a door into the mountain. It locks from the outside, but it isn't locked just frozen shut. Then the government shows up and starts shooting at them.

There is a real body count, and the dead are not necessarily who you are hoping for. There is an explanation for the mystery (and the new mysteries), but I don't know how important it is. The found footage part sees less and less important as the movie goes on. I don't know why director Renny Harlin bothered with it. I guess it kept costs down.

Still, this was a good basic horror in the snow, with pleasantly unlikable characters and a gory last act. We had no complaints.

Theater of Madness

What would Spooktober be without some Vincent Price. We queued Theater of Blood / Madhouse (1973), a nice theatrical double bill.

Theater of Blood starts with a theater critic being called on to visit a building of which he is part owner, to help the police evict some vagrants. Said vagrants kill said critics, and the police turn out to be actors. It was a setup by actor Edward Lionheart, Vincent Price. He was supposed to be dead, but was only in hiding, due to his humiliation at never winning a critics award. After the murder, he takes the corpse into a derelict theater and recites the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech from Julius Caesar. 

His plan is to kill all of his critics in a manner based on a Shakespearean play. This is a great conceit, when you remember how gruesome some of Shakespeare's murders are. For instance, Robert Morley is fed pies baked from his darling doggies, as in Titus Andronicus. 

He is aided by the vagrants, billed in the credits as Meth Drinkers (methylated spirits) and a mod young man with a horseshoe mustache and dark glasses. Ms. Spenser said "Diana Rigg" as soon as she saw him - and so he was. Ms. Rigg (who died around the week we watched this) played Price's daughter, who dressed in male drag to help her daddy.

In Madhouse, Price plays Paul Toomes, an actor who plays Doctor Death in a horror franchise. At a party where he is announcing his engagement to a a young starlet, a porno film producer reveals that she has made films for him. Price is enraged, and later, when she is alone, a figure in the costume of Dr. D murders her. Price comes to her room to apologize for flying off the handle, and finds her dead. Even he doesn't know if he did it.

He is acquitted of the crime, but commits himself to the titular madhouse.

When he is released, his friend, actor and Dr. Death screenwriter Peter Cushing takes him home. He tells him about a Dr. Death TV series in the works - produced by the porno producer from the party. Price isn't thrilled, but could use the work, and his friend needs the money. Especially because his wife has been disfigured in a car fire, gone mad and started to hang out with a collection of tarantulas. (I don't think this has anything to do with the plot, but is creepy as heck.)

As the production proceeds, people keep dying in ways inspired by Dr. Death movies. We, the audience, see the masked and caped Dr. Death, but is it Price or not? Not even he knows.

So, two theatrical thrillers with murders inspired by plays or movies. Each has a classic co-star as well. Actually, Madhouse has film clips of Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone as well. Maybe not as much fun as the Dr. Phibes movies, which are the inspiration for these, it seems, but creepy enough.

Walking My Vampire Back Home

We went into A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) with exactly this much information: Iranian vampire movie. 

It is filmed in black and white, usually at night, in a rundown Iranian town called Bad City. A rather cool young man, Arash Marandi, is looking after his heroin addicted father (who also likes to gamble and visit prostitutes). His pimp and pusher, Dominic Rains, shows up to demand payment, and takes Arash's Mustang convertible. 

Later, the pimp (who looks like an Ali G. character) is on his way home from roughing up a prostitute (Mozhan Mamo). He sees a woman in a chador on a dark street, and she silently follows him to his place. There, as he is trying to seduce him, she bites his finger off, kills him and drinks his blood. We also see her menace a little boy, but not kill him. She does take his skateboard.

Arash shows up to try to get his car back, sees the body, but mostly sees a brief case full of money and drugs, which he leaves with. He quits his job as gardener and starts dealing. He tries to hang out with some rich girls, and one of them pressures him into doing E with them - then blow him off when he tries to get romantic. (One of the other girls is the director, Ana Lily Amirpour. Look for the skeleton costume.)

The girl in the chador is skateboarding down a deserted street when she runs into a heavily tripping Arash, staring at a streetlight. They share a moment, and she tries to take him home, but he can't quite walk. So she loads him onto the board and off they go.

At her place, she puts a record on and they stand together - slowly, slowly, he reaches out to touch her, and they finally kiss. 

But can a poor but somewhat dishonest son of an addict find happiness with a girl vampire? Well, probably not - happiness is hard to find in Bad City. But maybe something.

This is a great movie. It's a very personal movie for Amirpour, who is Iranian, and has a very indie look, but was actually made in California, with lots of Americans behind the camera. I suppose this makes sense, because I doubt this will play in Iran any time soon. Also, very surreal and has a great soundtrack. 

When the Haunter Gets Captured by the Game

Haunter (2013) is another ghost story that's right in our (my) zone - small scale, not too scary, young female protagonist, clever twist. The twist is, it's from the point of view of the ghost.

It stars Abigail Breslin, a teenaged girl with a nice family - Mom Michelle Nolden, Dad Peter Outerbridge, and little brother Peter daCunha. It's the Sunday before her birthday, and she is slouching around with her walkman on (it's the 80s, you see) and giving everybody attitude about how everything is the same every day, and will be tomorrow as well. And she's right, the next day she wakes up on the same day. But this isn't Happy Death Day. You see, she's already dead, and she knows it. 

When she is in her bedroom practicing Peter and the Wolf on her clarinet, she starts to get flashes of another girl, from another time, who also plays clarinet. That girl, Eleanor Zichy, is still alive, living in the same house. Breslin, technically, is haunting her. But she's not worried about ghosts, she's worried becuase her father is an abusive jerk going psycho working on the family car. 

This live girl tells Breslin where to find a certain scrapbook, which details a series of murders that have taken place in the house, going back to the 1890s (?). However, a scary pale man (Stephen McHattie) warns her not to investigate any more. The closer she looks, the more awful her family will become - her own father will become abusive (and start working on the car). And it's true. The only way to get the family back to the loop of a not-so-bad Sunday is to ignore what she's learning.

Of course, she doesn't do that at all. She finds the hidden door, the hidden cellar, the hidden past. She sees it all in a sort of sepia-toned, shadowy vignetted color old-timey movie of the origin of the whole problem. And you bet she kicks its ass.

This is nicely low-budget - one set, the house (ghosts can't leave the house where they died). It's a Canadian production, with Canadian actors, except for Breslin, who was in Little Miss Sunshine. I'm not sure the premise is used as well as it could be, but it worked for me anyways. The last act, when it gets really scary, is also a little silly, but that can be a problem with these movies. Still, I enjoyed it, but Ms. Spenser thought it was too silly and not scary enough. Since we're programming horror all October, I'm sure I'll get her sooner or later.

If I Had Ever Been Here Before

I remembered Déjà Vu (2006) from previews and after seeing Don't Let Go, figured we should try it out. Same general idea - cop sees into the past and tries to solve a past crime.

In this one, the cop is Denzel Washington. A ferry in New Orleans is blown up and ATF agent Washington is on the case. He is recruited into a secret project by Adam Goldberg, who has a high-powered surveillance setup that can see into the past - SPOILER. He claims it uses artificial intelligence to process satellite imagery to give a detailed image, and that it can only show you what happened 4 days ago. You can't fast forward or rewind. It takes a while, but Washington figures it out - it's a time TV.

They can use it to focus on anything they want, but since they can't go back, they've got to be sure to focus on the right things. Washington begins to think that ferry passenger Paula Patton is the key, partly intuition, partly she's cute. He goes to her apartment and finds out that someone is trying to buy her truck. He also find "You can save her" on her fridge in magnetic letters. And he has left a message to her on her answering machine.

When Washington figures out that the time tv is really a window, he convinces the scientists to send his past self a note. Unfortunately, he leaves the office before it arrives. His partner follows up on it (in the past) and gets shot. The guy getting away is probably related to the terror incident, but he has left the range of the system. So Washington has to take a mobile unit with a virtual reality display and chase him (in the past) through the highways of the present, in a very silly and unsafe for civilians car chase. Well, this was directed by Tony Scott.

Well, you can guess what comes next - he goes back in time to catch the bomber, who we now know is disturbed wannabe soldier Jim Caviezel. Also, maybe to get with Patton. In a breakneck race against time, they head to the ferry - no time to alert the police, they only have an hour and a half! And they are 90 minutes away! In New Orleans traffic! Will they make it? 

Come on, it's time travel. It almost doesn't matter.

This turned out to be sillier (as in illogical) than I expected. The scriptwriters claim it was airtight before Scott messed it up. Still, Washington is pretty magnetic, as the investigator who sees right to the core of the matter, and expects everyone to get onboard or let him do his thing. Also, New Orleans.

What's Eating Him?

I don't know why we decided to re-watch Eating Raoul (1982). But it's always good to spend some time with Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov. 

Paul and Mary Bland are ordinary folk living in an LA apartment filled with her mother's collection of fabulous fifties furniture. He works in a low-budget liquor store, but wants to be a sommelier. She's a nurse, but wants to cook. When they have the money, they plan to open a nice restaurant in the country. In the meantime they have to deal with all the swingers in the apartment building. One of them barges in and starts mauling Mary, so Paul hits him over the head with a frying pan, killing him. So they take his money and dump him down the trash chute.

To get more of these rich perverts, Mary starts advertising as a dominatrix. Because she can't kill someone in cold blood, she has to actually work the scenario until the perv gets aggressive - then they kill him. It's a living.

Raoul (Robert Beltran) enters the picture as a locksmith they hire to upgrade their security - they don't even notice that he seems to be casing the place. When he comes back late at night to rob them, he finds Paul disposing of another body. Neither one can go to the police, so they make a deal. Raoul will dispose of the bodies (to a dog food factory) and split the money he gets with the Blands. 

Everything seems to be going fine, until Raoul makes one mistake: He falls in love with Mary. As a hot-blooded Latin, it's only to be expected. If you want a hint on how this works out, see the title.

So this isn't exactly hilarious, but it is good campy fun. Just seeing Mary Woronov as a dominatrux makes it all worthwhile.