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.

Don't You Roll Your Bloodshot Eyes at Me

We weren't expecting much from Bloodshot (2020), except for Vin Diesel. And we got it.

It starts as a perfectly ordinary action movie - Diesel completes a dangerous mission and goes on a sweet getaway with his beloved. This was hokey enough that it drove Ms. Spenser to quit watching, although she dropped back in later. Then, to compound the corn, bad guys capture them, torture and kill the wife, then kill Diesel.

Wow, over so soon! Oh, no.

Diesel wakes up with no memory. Tech exec Guy Pearce explains that he is the first person brought back to life by their "Bloodshot" nanobot process. Now he can heal from any wound, as long as the nanites have power. He meets some of the other team members, most of them enhanced with a variety of prosthetic devices. Then he starts getting his memory back.

He goes out on his own to get the bad guys who killed him and his wife. Then he heads back to the company to get the nanites fueled up. SPOILER for big twist - there, he has his mind wiped and new memories are implanted. They show the same scenario as last time - mission, vacation, torture and kill wife, but this time with a different bad guy. So when he wakes up, he will go after this guy. 

This seems like a complicated way to get someone to do some killing for you. But it does explain why the first part of the movie was so corny - it was scripted! It wasn't real. Nice out for the scriptwriters.

All of this plot stuff is interesting: We have a hero who doesn't know who he is, and when he finds out, it isn't real. But it's kind of incoherent - we're not getting Inception here. But how is it as a hook to hang a bunch of action scenes on? Actually, not that great either. Since he can be reconstituted by his nanites, Diesel is kind of unstoppable. Also, most of his fighting is just computerized SFX. Makes sense since this is the first feature for Dave Wilson, who previously did mostly special effects work.

Bloodshot is based on a Valiant comic series, and was supposed to be the start of the Valiant Cinematic Universe. Since it was released during COVID quarantine, it might not be possible to judge its success fairly. But I don't think this franchise is going anywhere.