The V Word

A lot of people were critical of the two year run of Showtime’s series Masters of Horror, but for the most part, I enjoyed it. Like all anthology series, the lack of a permanent cast or writing stable leads to a lot of inconsistency, and some of the one hour episodes were amazingly bad. But overall I would give the series a pass. I purchased the complete run in individual releases, since the producers of the series guaranteed it would never be released as season sets. Those sets look nice, too.

Ultimately, a horror anthology series, no matter how original it wants to be perceived, takes a shot at that most popular of dark creatures, the vampire, and for Masters of Horror, that shot came in the middle of the second series with the episode The V Word, written by series creator Mick Garris and directed by Ernest Dickerson. I assume the title is a play on the Showtime lesbian drama The L Word.

Kerry (Arjay Smith) and Justin (Brandon Nadon) are two high school friends, more of the rabid gamer type than belonging to the cool crowd. They decide to seek excitement by sneaking into a funeral home at night to see the body of one of their dead classmates. If you are a horror movie watcher, you know what a terrible idea this is. Once they make it into the mortuary, they find they are not alone, although strictly speaking they are the only living things in the building. Apparently of former teacher of theirs, Mr. Chaney (Michael Ironside), fired for inappropriate relations with students is there in a state of un-death. This not only poses terminal consequences for Arjay and Justin, but it brings danger to their families, as well.

The first half of the show is the two boys sneaking into the funeral home, and it is the best part. As they creep through the darkened building (“Wasn’t that coffin lid closed the first time?”) it is very spooky. Once the vampire is revealed, it becomes less frightening, more run-of –the-mill. Still the overall grade for the episode is positive. The cast is very good, particularly Arjay Smith, and Michael Ironside seems to be having a great time with the role. For some reason, I love the scene where he is walking under the moonlight holding open a tattered umbrella.* Some people may gripe the episode never explains how Mr. Chaney became a vampire (One of the boys asks him “What happened, did you bite on the wrong dick?” “Something like that” he replies.) but we know the basics, and the origin story would have just slowed things down.

There’s a fair amount of gore. These vampires don’t have fangs, so they have to tear out the throats of their victims to feed. Despite its flaws, if you are looking to watch a horror story and only have an hour to spare, you could do a lot worse than The V Word.

* I know I’ve said this before, but if vampires burst into flame at the touch of sunlight (unless they are sparkly girly vampires), how can they bear moonlight? It is reflected sunlight, after all. At least, they should get some nasty blisters.
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Happy Halloween!

Hope you all have a great day on the best holiday of the year. Just remember, today the barrier between this world and the next will be at its thinnest, so beware. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

Night of the Creeps

A lot of bad horror flicks have been released through the years – you can find a lot of them by scrolling through this site – but one of the more notable films not to be released on DVD has been the 1986 cult classic Night of the Creeps. Horror fans will have to find another movie to bitch about being unavailable, because Night of the Creeps was released last week, just in time for Halloween. In recent years, the success of Shaun of the Dead has inspired a number of films in the zombie-comedy – “zombedy” – sub-genre, such as Hide and Creep, Trailer Park of Terror and Undead or Alive. But Night of the Creeps got there first, and is one of the best.

In outer space, some small, naked aliens are chasing one of their kind through a spaceship. The fleeing E.T. is carrying a metal container, which he manages to jettison through space. This does not look good, but what is the chance of this canister making it all the way to Earth? Hell, Superman’s space pod made it all the way from Krypton. We’re doomed.

Down on Earth, it’s 1959. Kids at the local college are having parties and making out, a coed has dumped her high school sweetheart Ray because he became a cop, and we can tell it’s the 50s because everything is in black & white. The alien canister is heading right for them, but that isn’t even the biggest of their worries, because, as so often happens in college towns, an axe murderer has escaped from the local asylum. Ray’s sweetheart finds the axe murderer in a tragic way, while her date locates the canister, and has an alien slug jump into his mouth. Some people are unlucky, this couple constituted a black hole of misfortune.

Now it’s the present (1986) and everything is in color again. Ray is a bitter police detective (now played by the great Tom Atkins, in what might be his best role), still mourning the loss of his true love, and the bobby-soxers of 1959 have given way to Revenge of the Nerds-style hijinks. A couple of dorks are looking to impress a girl by joining a fraternity, and are given a task of stealing a corpse. The fraternity has no intention of letting them in, because in the movies, fraternities are evil, just like in real life.

(An aside. The truly horrifying thing about this movie is the exposure to how awful fashion and music were in this decade. How did we ever let it get that bad? Culturally, we would have been better off to go straight from 1979 to 1990.)

The corpse stealing caper goes wrong, as they often do, and the two dorks manage to revive the corpse of the slug-swallower, frozen since 1959. Apparently the slugs enter human hosts, feed on the brain while they breed, controlling the dead host while this happens, then the hosts head explodes, releasing a horde of new slugs. This all seems like a bad thing. Soon the dorks have teamed with Detective Ray and the Hot Chick, and are all that stand in the way of the Earth becoming a zombified alien slug breeding ground.

This is definitely a campy B movie, but it is a very well done B movie. It’s good enough to function as a comedy or a low budget horror film, so you can enjoy either or both. With the exception of Atkins and a couple of famous faces in small roles (David Payner and Dick Miller), none of the cast went on to lasting success in acting, but they acquit themselves well. Atkin’s catch phrase in the movie, “Thrill me”, said whenever he answers the phone or arrives at the scene of a crime, is one of the most memorable in horror history, and you’ll probably find yourself answering the phone that way for a while.

The movie features the director’s preferred ending, although the ending most of us saw back in the 80s is available as a special feature. There are also deleted scenes, two commentary tracks, featurettes and trailers, so if you are a huge fan of the movie, this should be heaven for you. The transfer is surprisingly sharp. I was expecting a lot of grain, but it cleaned up quite well. My biggest complaint is the releasing company seems to have gone out of its way to pick the worst possible DVD cover, but you can always turn it to face the wall.
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Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead

A film series that was probably not endorsed by the West Virginia Department of Tourism, the Wrong Turn movies have been reasonably well done, in relation to other films in the Inbred Cannibal Mutant genre. Extremely gory, I thought the original, with Eliza Dushku and Jeremy Sisto, was surprisingly good, and Wrong Turn 2, with Henry Rollins, a solid sequel which handled its reality show subplot competently. It would be bucking the odds for the third film in the series to hold up, but past efforts were enough to warrant giving Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead a try.

The movie opens with some rafters pitching camp at the edge of a river. What could have been a nice getaway collapses in a hail of arrows. Yep, the Inbred Cannibal Mutants (ICMs) from the first two movies are back. Some of them, anyway, as the events of the previous films have trimmed their numbers to just two. Oh well, they make up for their scarcity by being almost unkillable, as the main remaining ICM will be shot once, stabbed twice, chopped twice with an axe, and run through with a spear, all to little effect.

Meanwhile, the local department of corrections is preparing for a prisoner transfer featuring a dangerous gang leader named Chavez. To prevent a rescue attempt, they decide to do the transfer at night through a deeply forested section of the state. Don’t they know rural West Virginia is pure cannibal country? Apparently not, or maybe they just think this will be cheaper than keeping the prisoners.

Sure enough, as they are passing through a particularly deserted stretch of road, they are forced off and wrecked by the ICM in a tow truck. After everyone gets out of the overturned bus, the prisoners easily take the weapons from the slow-witted cop hero, and for the rest of the movie, it’s the prisoners trying to find an escape route while fending off the attempts by the locals to make Convict Chow out of them.

There’s a lot wrong with the movie. We know that one of the “prisoners” is an undercover marshal, but twice he is handed the shotgun and doesn’t use it to help subdue the prisoners, awaiting the opportunity to trip Chavez with a chain instead, which seems inefficient. There are a series of Rube Goldberg type traps in the woods set by the ICMs, which are a little too unbelievable, as strange as that might seem in a movie about killer mutants. The special effects are as gory as ever, but not quite up to snuff. When it comes time to saw through the legs of one of the inmates (told you it was gory), it’s obvious the “legs” are nothing more than thin pipe, which parts way too easily with a knife.

Still, you get what you pay for, and it’s obvious the budget was much lower for this installment in the series than its predecessors. Although it is supposed to take place in the United States, it was actually filmed in Eastern Europe, and most of the actors with speaking parts are British, although they do a reasonable job with their fake accents.

At the end of the day, if you liked the first two Wrong Turn movies, you’ll probably like this one, too, although it’s not quite as good.
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More Halloween Move Recommendations

If you've already exhausted my list of recommendations for Halloween flicks, you can head over to Bloody Good Horror, for Casey's list, with which I wholeheartedly concur.
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New Norman Prentiss Interview

If you are on Cemetery Dance's mailing list, the most recent newsletter features an interview I did with Norman Prentiss (yes, that's my real name) to promote his upcoming release Invisible Fences. Norman was gracious enough to allow me to do it, and hopefully I was able to come up with a couple of questions that were worthy. If you didn't get the newsletter, you can read the interview at Cemetery Dance's website by clicking here.
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The Nightwalker

Leisure Books promoted 2008 as the “Year of the Werewolf” in horror fiction (giving rise to the slogan, “Werewolf is the new zombie), with three titles involving lycanthropy in the first half of the year. The first was J.F. Gonzalez’ Shapeshifter, and the third was Ray Garton’s Ravenous (Garton has also published a sequel to Ravenous called Bestial), coming in a couple of months. Thie middle title in the triumvirate is a reprint of Thomas Tessier’s classic novel from 1979, The Nightwalker. Looking back, the werewolf craze never really caught hold, but the three are all fine stories in their own right.

The Nightwalker is the story of Bobby Ives, a Vietnam veteran living in London who is apparently recovering from psychological trauma suffered during the war. Bobby begins suffering strange symptoms, a recurrent catatonia and odd feelings in his extremities. Eventually, his behavior deteriorates to the point of murder, as he is overcome by irresistible impulses. Personally, he becomes more callous and narcissistic. Bobby comes to the belief that he has lived before, as the owner of a Caribbean plantation, and that he has been cursed into becoming a werewolf. Tessier’s prose is masterful, and the central intrigue of the novel is whether Bobby is really becoming a werewolf, or if he is just a psychotic with canine delusions.

Because the original novel is about 200 pages long, and Leisure tries to make all their publications just a little more than 300 pages, a bonus novella is included, as with previous Leisure releases. This sort of bonus is one I appreciate, and offers interesting bonuses to fans. The included novella here is The Dreams of Dr. Ladybank, a 100 page story written by Tessier in 1991. It’s about a psychologist who learns he can mentally control the actions of two of his patients. As always with Tessier, it is well written, but it is just too long, as the concept can’t sustain a 100 page story. You know where it’s going, and you just become impatient for it to get there so you can be through.

So, my judgment is: Thumbs up for The Nightwalker, thumbs down for The Dreams of Dr. Ladybank. The book includes an introduction by Jack Ketchum and an afterword by the author himself.