The Fog (2005)

Way back in the aughts (You remember those. No? They ended three years ago! Fewer drugs, dude.) there was a mini-wave of remaking horror films from the 70s/80s. Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Arthur all got remakes, with enough success to encourage studios to keep doing it.

John Carpenter’s 1980 film The Fog was a fairly obvious choice to be remade. Successful at the time, it isn’t held in quite the same reverence as some of his better-known films, and Carpenter himself has said is feels dated. So, cast some good looking young TV stars, use modern special effects and it couldn’t go wrong. Right? Oy…

Nick Castle (Tom Welling, Smallville) owns a charter fishing boat harbored in Antonio Bay, Oregon. Despite the name, Antonio Bay is a small island off the coast of Oregon. He takes fisherman out for brief excursions with his completely incompetent mate Spooner. We only get to know Spooner briefly, but in that short time he manages to almost capsize the boat with the anchor winch and ignores the small matter of engine trouble at sea. Gilligan was better. One day, Nick and Spooner are floating along when they snag their anchor, disturbing a small bag. This is significant because…I guess because that’s how the movie starts.

Back on shore, we learn there is tension in the town between young entrepreneurs like Nick, who want the town to spend to upgrade the marina, and the older generation who spent the funds on a statue of the four founding fathers of the town. This is supposed to be a heated controversy, but neither Nick nor the town elders seem to be able to work up much enthusiasm for the fight. The timing is crucial, since this is the 100th anniversary of the town’s founding in 1871. Wait, when is this movie set? 2005? But…Try not to think about it.

Nick has an old girlfriend Elizabeth (Maggie Grace, Taken) who has been gone to New York for a while, and a new girlfriend Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair, Hellboy) who is the owner and sole operator of the town’s radio station. Nick is surprised when he picks up a female hitchhiker late at night (in a creepy don’t-get-in-the-truck way) and finds it is Elizabeth, who has apparently walked back to Oregon from New York. This would seem to trigger a heated lovers’ triangle, but none of the three can work up much interest. Stevie has a son, whose purpose is to be put in danger.

Meanwhile, disturbing that bag (or possibly the 100th/134th anniversary thing, or sunspots or something) has triggered a strange fog that darts in and out, hence the name of the movie. The fog is filled with ghosts, who murder people indiscriminately and really hate streetlamps. It seems that in 1871, there was another mythical Oregon island with a prosperous trading colony. Through trade with China, they all caught leprosy. That isn’t how leprosy works, but whatever. Cast out from their island (by who?) they search for a new home. The good founding fathers of Antonio Bay promise them half the island, but rob them, lock them on their boat and burn them alive instead, and use the stolen wealth to build the town. This does seem like the way to get a monument to yourself, judging by history. Rather than take their revenge on those who actually wronged them, the ghostly lepers wait a century or more to punish the relatively innocent descendants and unconnected people living in modern Antonio Bay.

Oh. no! Limited visibility!

There is also a drunken priest who wanders around misquoting the Bible, various impalements, and a lot of broken streetlamps. I don’t reveal the ending of movies so as not to spoil them for those who haven’t seen the film, but in this case I don’t understand it anyway. Something happens, but who knows why.

The actors are good looking but uninspired. Even Ms. Blair, who is normally an interesting actress, looks like she wishes she were somewhere else. The direction is flat. The modern special effects don’t really look as good as the 1980 version. There really isn’t anything about which to recommend this movie.

My favorite anecdote related to this movie is the director insisted that Selma Blair, a petite woman, wear formidable falsies in her role. Why? The role of Stevie in the original version was played by carpenter’s then-wife Adrienne Barbeau, who was fairly busty. Again, why? This is apparently yet another mystery of The Fog.

Dark House

In time for Halloween, a group of new horror DVD releases have hit the stores under the banner of Fangoria Frightfest. They are all inexpensively priced, and somewhat indistinguishable outwardly in quality. I settled on Dark House as my first test subject, primarily because its cast included Jeffrey Combs (Reanimator) a genre veteran who is under-valued as an actor. I figured he’d be entertaining, at least.

Fourteen years earlier, a little girl accepts a dare from her friends to enter a spooky house where a crazy woman cares for foster children. Inside she finds a house filled with freshly murdered children, and the proprietor standing at the kitchen sink, grinding her hands away in the garbage disposal. The little girl, by the way, takes this all in rather calmly. I start getting nervous by the third butchered body I find, and I can’t stand to see someone mutilate themselves with a garbage disposal, but she takes it like a champ.

Flash forward to the movie’s present, and a now-adult girl is going to acting classes and seeing a shrink to deal with the memory of those events. The psychiatrist must have studied under Doctor Mengele, because he urges her to return to the scene of the murders to confront her fears. Oh, yeah, that’s great advice. Her opportunity to do so comes one day in acting class when Walston (Combs) shows up to hire the fledgling thespians. He makes a living off building spooky attractions, and his next project is to turn the Darrode House, where the killings occurred into Dark House (hence the title) into the greatest of his attractions. Given the lure of money, the students accept.

The group of acting students is one of the weaker parts of the movie, since they pretty much fit the stereotypes. There’s The Jock, The Slut, The Goth Chick, etc. despite the stereotypes, only a couple are annoying, so you don’t fall into the usual mode of rooting for everyone to die. They agree to play roles in the haunted house, not knowing one of their group has a history with it. Let me tell you, when the main actress is playing an actress who is supposed to be acting, you can tell she has the wrong major.

Dark House does look like the greatest haunted house ever. There are lifelike holograms that chase you down the hallways, elaborate sets, and anything else you could want in an attraction. I certainly wanted to buy a ticket. Of course, on the trial run-through, with a couple of reporters present (one from a fictional version of Fangoria, for those of you who like your stories meta), everything goes wrong. The holograms come to life, the fake traps turn deadly, and the group is diminished as they try to find a way to escape.

It doesn’t sound that great, does it? But surprisingly, I was pretty pleased with it. Combs is a delight as always, but the main thing is the makers of the movie didn’t take it overly seriously. There is a fair amount of humor, each of the characters have something to do other than die, and there are a number of in-joke references to other films (sample lines include “Be afraid. Very afraid.” and “Come with me if you want to live.”) I thought the frequent intercuts to warnings on the screens of the computers that controlled the house (FILE CORRUPTED, VIRUS ATTACK, etc.) to be useless and annoying since we know it is a supernatural threat, but nothing’s perfect.

If Dark House is a good representation of the series, I’m eager to see the others. If you’re looking for something new this Halloween, you could do worse than this one. It doesn’t set the world on fire, but it will give you an evening’s entertainment.

2001 Maniacs: Field Of Screams

After 2001 Maniacs proved to be a direct-to-video success, the creator of the movie spent several years coming up with funding for the sequel, released in 2010 and called 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. It would probably have been better if they hadn’t bothered.

It is an indeterminate time after the first movie, and the ghostly inhabitants of the haunted town in Georgia have a problem. They have lost the cooperation of the local police (why did they have it, anyway?) and can no longer detour unsuspecting Yankees to their little hamlet. Well, if their victims won’t come to them, they’ll go to their victims. They get a bus, and set off for the North, to put on a traveling show. We won’t even bother considering why they would need a bus since they are ghosts, or why, in their best Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland style, they obsess so much about putting on a good show. They stop in Iowa (there are plenty of Yankees between Georgia and Iowa, but I guess they are picky) and set up shop. They attract the attention of the cast, crew and producers of a reality show that seems based on the horrendous thing starring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, a joke that might have been slightly funny five years ago. Amidst lame musical numbers and magic acts, they once again up their kill count.

Only a few minor members of the cast return, a shame, since the replacements are mostly inferior. Bill Moseley (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects) replaces Robert Englund and does a good job, although they either forget which eye he had the patch on in the first movie or thought it would be funny to switch. It isn’t. The maniacs now prominently include a black man and a Chinese woman, neither of which makes much sense. The Chinese character’s main purpose is to speak in broken English, which I suppose someone thought was funny, too.

The first movie was low budget, and this one was even lower. Most of the cast changes, with the exception of Moseley, are for the worse, and the jokes and gore this time around seem lame. The bad taste remains, but the gags just don't work. I was looking forward to this sequel, but I would recommend you give it a pass.
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2001 Maniacs

I don’t consider myself a terrible demanding consumer of mass culture. Not everything I read or watch has to change my life or reveal some hidden facet of the human condition. I’m satisfied if the product is merely entertaining, which few seem to be these days, and as long as it holds my interest, I’m perfectly content. This preface, by the way, is my way of apologizing in advance for liking the 2005 gorefest 2001 Maniacs.

A remake/re-imagining of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 60s schlocker 2000 Maniacs, 2001 Maniacs is a tasteless horror comedy. But more of the jokes work than not, even if they are the type to make you wince after you laugh.

A group of losers from a Northern college are heading South for Spring Break when they are detoured to a small town in Georgia, a town celebrating its annual jubilee. The kids, along with some other travelers, decide to stay and enjoy the Southern hospitality, but there is a high price to pay. It seems the 2001 residents of the town are the ghosts of the people who lived there during the Civil War, people who were massacred by Northern troops during Sherman’s march through Georgia. Each year, they rise from the dead to massacre and cannibalize Yankees, unable to rest until they have killed 2001 Northerners to balance the scale.

The victims are killed in imaginative and gory ways, and the humor works more often than not. A good deal of it is inspired by there being a black guy and an Asian lady among the group of victims, and there is almost a gay or bisexual victim, so if you are easily offended, you might want to miss this.

The cast is led by Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise), who plays the mayor of the town, and does a great job, but the rest of the mostly unknown cast is good, too. You have to be in the right mood for it, and you can’t be overly sensitive, but I thought this was a fun movie.
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Speed Dating with the Dead

As a Southerner myself (as you may have guessed from the title of this blog, which everyone keeps telling me is beyond stupid) I have a particular weakness for horror writers who also hail from the Old South, and one of the best working today is Scott Nicholson, author of The Red Church and Burial To Follow, among many other fine works. His latest, available in e-book format, is called Speed Dating with the Dead.

A team of paranormal researchers, led by Digger Wilson, investigate a “haunted hotel”, The White Horse Inn, to see if they can find evidence of supernatural phenomena. They come equipped with all sorts of scientific equipment to perform various measurements. Digger also has another motive as his recently deceased wife has promised to contact him (shades of Harry Houdini!). He is much less than positive this will happen (refreshingly he is very skeptical of the paranormal, despite his position with the team), but he gives it a go anyway.

As those of us who read horror stories and watch horror movies are well aware, you should not Meddle with Things Best Left Unknown. The researchers in the book ignore this basic rule, and their efforts awaken an ancient evil. Soon, the numbers of the people in the hotel are on the wane, and it is up to Digger and his daughter Kendra to put an end to what they started.

Nicholson always writes a fast paced story, and this one is no exception. I am a doubter of all things supernatural myself, but Nicholson has actually been involved in “Ghost Hunter” type paranormal research, and his familiarity with the methodology employed lends a sense of verisimilitude to the story. Like with any well-written tale, you begin to believe you are there.

You will never go wrong when you read anything by Scott Nicholson, and this is another good one. To learn how to order the e-book, visit Scott’s site, The Haunted Computer.
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The Book of Blood

“Everybody is a book of blood; Wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”

With those words, Clive Barker in 1984 opened his landmark six volume Books of Blood, collections of short stories that changed the face of horror. Wild flights of imagination, an unflinching look at the dark corners of sexuality, and a never before seen focus on body horror burned like fire through the field, a fire that still hasn’t gone out. Over the years, many of the stories from the books have been the basis for films, the best known being the Hellraiser and Candyman series, but also the films Rawhead Rex, Nightbreed, and the recent The Midnight Meat Train. In 2009, with Barker acting as producer, a movie was made from the title story (combined with the additional story “On Jerusalem Street”) “The Book of Blood”.

Mary Florescu (Sophie Ward), a paranormal investigator, along with her cameraman Reg (Paul Blair) and a psychic named Simon McNeal (Jonas Armstrong) move into an old house with a tortured history, to look for supernatural phenomena. They ultimately find the house is an intersection on the highways of the dead, a place where the dead can tell their stories. This knowledge brings death for one of the three, wealth and fame for one, and a life of unimaginable torture for the third.

The story owes a lot, or at least has certain surface similarities to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, itself filmed twice, once successfully. Its biggest problem is the work it is based on is among Barker’s slightest (the original story was just a little more than an introduction to the original work), and there’s just not enough on which to hang 100 minutes of movie. The beginning and ending are satisfying enough, but the middle tends to meander along. There are one too many scenes where the characters have to react to unexplained thumps and crashes, and much of the time the plot is just keeping time until the climax can start.

All in all, not a terrible movie, but one which would probably have worked better at half the length. There are ongoing plans to film other stories from Barker’s collection, and many of them should offer a more substantial basis for a movie.
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Duma Key

Thirty years ago, when Stephen King was just beginning his career, one of his early proponents was John D. MacDonald, who wrote the introduction to King’s collection Night Shift, and mentioned King’s work in several of his own books. MacDonald was, of course, the progenitor of the “Florida novel”, a type of book that takes advantage of Florida’s unusual geography and demographic makeup. Now Stephen King has written his own “Florida novel”, Duma Key.

The protagonist of Duma Key is Edgar Freemantle, a successful building contractor in Minnesota. Edgar’s pleasant life is shattered in an on-site accident, which costs him his right arm, and leaves him with problems from an excessively shaken brain. The accident leads to the end of his career, the break-up of his marriage, and his estrangement from his previous life. On the advice of his therapists, he relocates to Florida, and takes up painting, a skill for which he finds he has great talent. He also finds something far more sinister, that there is something wrong with his new home, something which is giving power to his work, power to change reality.

At first glance, this seems like a more-or-less standard setup for a horror novel. But King works wonders here. This is a novel of supernatural horror, but it is also about dealing with loss, about trying to find redemption, and coping with redemption. Edgar pays a terrible price for his new skills.

As always, King is a master of characterization. The book is filled with indelible characters, like the beach philosopher Wireman, and his charge, Elizabeth Eastbrook. You develop feelings for the characters, which gives great power to their ultimate fates.

A lot of people delight in criticizing King’s recent work. Depending on who you ask, his masterpiece is either Salem’s Lot, The Stand, The Shining, or It, all books written in the first few years of his career. This book is very different. It is written by a man looking at 60, not at 30, and while it may not have the exuberant pacing of King’s first few novels, it more than makes up for it in the maturity of the writing. I have been a faithful reader of Stephen King since the beginning, and, in my opinion, this is one of the best things he’s ever written. And that is high praise, indeed.
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Pulse 2

Although I am in the minority, I kind of enjoyed the 2006 American re-make of Pulse. It was spooky, visually striking, and starred Kristin Bell. (Note to filmmakers seeking the all-powerful Dead In The South endorsement: You will always get better marks for having Kristin Bell in your cast. You should know this anyway, but if you don’t, there you are.) I was intrigued when I discovered the story had been continued (sort-of) in two sequels, the first of which is the imaginatively titled Pulse 2.

The most recognizable actor in the second installment is Jamie Bamber, best known for playing the spoiled, petulant Apollo on Battlestar Galactica. He’s pretty much the same character here. The movie is set in the post-apocalyptic world after the events of the first movie, although few of the characters display much understanding of what’s going on. To recap: Dead souls have re-entered our world through electronic technology, and suck the lifeforce from the living, who continue on a bit before their body turns into a pile of carbon and collapses, while their spirit joins the revenants. The plot such as it is concerns Bamber’s attempt to find his daughter and bring her back to his technology-free safe haven,

This is presented with dreadfully slow pacing. At one point, a character cleans her apartment, and it is shown in excruciating detail, practically in real time. At no point is the viewer ever made to care what happens to either Bamber or his daughter, so it’s tough sledding. More intriguing subplot ideas, such as the fact that some of the ghosts don’t seem to realize they are dead, and fear the living, sweep right on by. They do throw in the obligatory naked-for-no-reason woman halfway through to keep the male viewer paying attention.

There is also an example of one of those irritating incidents where the only way to advance the plot is to have a character do something so stupid no one would ever do it in real life. Halfway through, Bamber returns home with his daughter. “Thank God.” I thought. “At least it’s short.” Now Bamber knows two things: 1) The revenants can reach you through electronics, and 2) His ex-wife has become one of them. What does he do? He fires up the old laptop, and sends her an e-mail. This means he and the kid have to go on the run again, and leads to the death of at least two other characters who had the misfortune to know him.

There is also a Pulse 3, which I will get to as soon as I get the bad taste of this one out of my mouth. Hopefully, it will wrap things up.

Room 205

There are some movies you shouldn’t watch after taking a significant amount of codeine (doctor’s orders, just to be clear. Room 205 is one of those. It took almost two hours for me to watch the first 11 minutes of this, as the movie and the codeine conspired to repeatedly put me to sleep.

Room 205 is a 2007 Danish film (originally called Kollegiet). Katrine, possibly the meekest woman on earth, goes away to college and moves into a dorm filled with some of the rottenest students on the planet. Her new dorm-mates are led by Sanne, who is the type of person that only exists in movies. She lives to treat everyone around her cruelly, and in real life, would have been the victim of a massive murder conspiracy long before these events. The only person who is half-way decent to Katrine is the resident stud, Lukas, who is nice to her long enough to score, and then treats her like the rest. Throughout the mistreatment, it never occurs to Katrine to stand up for herself.

It seems that Sanne’s room (#205, coincidentally the title of the film) is haunted. Years earlier, a girl living in the room was gang-raped and murdered in the bathroom, and since then, her spirit has been trapped in the mirror. I have to say, this movie does not paint the most pleasant picture of Danish dorm life. Katrine accidentally breaks the mirror with her blood (!), releasing the vengeful spirit, and she goes to work wreaking revenge on the hapless students. She does this mostly by hanging around and glowering at them until they have a fatal accident, getting their head caught in an elevator door, stabbing themselves through the eye with a piece of glass, or something. Katrine and her fellow outcast Rolf must reassemble the mirror and trap the spirit back where she belongs before she glowers at them.

This is one of the slowest-paced movies I’ve ever seen. Minutes pass with nothing happening, without hardly any dialogue. When a character walks down a hallway, you get to follow her every lethargic step of the way. Many of the scenes are deliberately shot at least partially out of focus, which I guess is supposed to lend an air of surrealism, but mostly just induces a headache.

The torpid pace might be excusable if the time was spent developing the characters, but they remain stereotypical enough to be summed up in a word or two. Katrine is a milquetoast, Sanne is a bitch, Lukas is a horndog, and Rolf is a wimp. Even in the penultimate scene where one character chases another through the dorm, they both seem mainly bored. By the way, one thing this movie has in common with American films is the actors look five to ten years too old for their parts.

The DVD for this was issued through Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert’s Ghost House imprint, and later this year the company will produce an American version, tentatively to be called The Dorm. This is one case where I’m betting the remake will be better than the original.
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New John Carpenter Film On The Horizon

There’s no living director in the horror genre that I idolize more than John Carpenter. If he had only directed The Thing, it would have been enough, but throw in Halloween, The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China, In the Mouth of Madness, Prince of Darkness…. You get the picture. Carpenter hasn’t directed a feature since 2002’s disappointing Ghosts of Mars (he did direct two episodes of Masters of Horror), so it made me happy to see he will be getting behind the helm of a new film.

Variety reports Carpenter will direct a ghost story entitled The Ward for Echo Lake . Hopefully, this also means Carpenter’s health, which has been shaky for a while, is on the upswing.

Rest Stop 2: Don't Look Back

(Spoiler warning: this will, of necessity, discuss some plot points from the first Rest Stop movie. If you haven’t seen the first one, don’t read this if you don’t want to know what happened to some of the characters.)

I’m one of the few people who liked the movie Rest Stop, so I was looking forward to Rest Stop 2: Don’t Look Back. I enjoyed it about as well as the first one.

When the movie starts, it’s been a years since Nicole and Jesse disappeared. We know they’re dead, but the folks back home don’t. Jesse’s brother Tom is just back from the Iraq war, and he sets out to find what happened to his brother, along with Nicole’s best friend Marilyn, and his friend Jared, who satisfies the rule that in every horror movie, there must be one character who annoys the hell out of you. They retrace Jesse and Nicole’s path, even though there’s no way they would know which route they took. They find success when they run into a creepy convenience store operator, who directs them along the path to the rest stop where most of the first movie took place, giving them an ambiguous warning in the process.

The first movie concealed that it was a ghost story for most of the way, but the sequel has no reason not to be up-front about it. All the ectoplasmic characters from the first one are back, including the mysterious pickup driver and the weird fundamentalist family, and now Nicole and Jesse are haunting the area as well, which amps up the guilt quotient for the new characters.

The movie fills in some of the backstory about the driver and the weird family, and partially explains why they haunt the rest stop (although not why they kill those who pass by), and there is introduced a mystical way to defeat the ghosts, which gives the characters something to work for.

If you liked the first Rest Stop, I think you’ll probably like this one, too, and if you didn’t like the first one, you probably shouldn’t bother. The ending leaves open the possibility for further movies in the series, which is good or bad news depending on whether you like them.