31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024 - Day 1: DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981)

 

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

In an agricultural community in the deep rural South, mentally challenged 36-year-old Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake) enjoys spending time with Marylee (Tonya Crowe), which arouses the ire of bullying redneck mailman Otis Hazelrigg (Charles Durning). The mailman harbors unsavory interest in the young girl (she's around nine years old), so he stirs up three of his friends by convincing them that sweet and harmless Bubba is likely to do something unspeakable to Marylee. It's made clear that the quartet make sport of regularly tormenting Bubba, but things reach critical mass when Bubba and Marylee investigate the new fountain that a neighbor has installed in their backyard. Marylee tries to convince Bubba to sneak into the yard with her, but, fearing that he would get into trouble, Bubba demurs. Once in the backyard, Marylee is attacked by the owner's big dog, and though mauled, Otis saves her and brings her to her mother's door. When the child is brought to the doctor, it's a small town, so news travels fast, regardless of the information's accuracy, and it is assumed that Bubba did something unspeakable to Marylee, so while the sheriff calls for volunteers to find Bubba, Otis gathers his loutish friends and the four embark on a mission of vigilante "justice," equipped with bloodhounds and armed to the teeth. A terrified Bubba flees to his home, where he lives with his aged mother, who reminds him of "the hiding game." Bubba knows the hiding game and he's good at it, so when the posse arrives, Mama Ritter tells the vigilantes that he's not there (which is technically true). The dogs, however, pick up Bubba's scent, which leads them to a scarecrow in the middle of a field. Baffled at first, the posse soon realizes that Bubba has hidden inside the scarecrow and, led by Otis, they blast the shit out of poor bubba, shooting him twenty-one times.

Bubba, failing at "how not to be seen."

Moments after ventilating the innocent man-child, one of the rednecks receives a CB call telling him that the search for Bubba has been called off and that Marylee is alright, thanks to Bubba saving her life. The four are tried for the murder, but the prosecution's evidence is nil, so the four walk. Bubba's distraught mother loses it in the courtroom, and as she's being hauled out by the bailiffs, she more or less curses the murderers by ominously stating "You may think that you're getting off free, but there's other justice in this world!!!" The shameless murderers celebrate getting off scot free, and they celebrate with beers at the local bar before resume their lives as normal. 

A few weeks go by and Marylee is home from the hospital, but she is depressed and wonders where Bubba is. No one informed her of the murder, and her parents, who only just realized the deep and genuine connection she had with her cruelly executed friend, opt not to tell her about it. The girl learns of Bubba's death from his mother, but she refuses to believe he's gone, noting that he must be playing the hiding game. But things get weird when the scarecrow that Bubba hid inside begins appearing in broad daylight in the fields of two of the murderers, so ringleader Otis is convinced that someone knows what they did and that that person is trying to rattle them. Suspicion initially falls upon the prosecutor, who vowed to nail them if he could find so much as a shred of evidence, but Otis's sights soon fall on Bubba's mum. 

As two of the rednecks meet gruesome "accidental" deaths (wood chipper and burial under tons of grain in a silo), Marylee also falls under Otis's suspicious scrutiny, and when he confronts her to find out of Bubba's mother told him anything, she states she knows that he killed Bubba, because Bubba told her. This spooks the hell out of Otis, so he returns to Bubba's mother to intimdate her but accidentally kills her in the process, so he blows up her corpse and her house by igniting a staged gas leak.  Otis and the remaining redneck dig up Bubba's grave to make sure he's dead, and from there things escalate to a final reckoning for Otis, who chases Marylee through a pumpkin patch in the middle of the night, with a reveal of exactly who is exacting revenge at the climax.

After hearing about it for over forty years, I finally saw DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981). I was really into made-for-TV exploitation and horror offering during my growing up years, but I missed this one because it aired during one of my Saturday night shifts at the local movie theater. When we returned to school the following Monday, my peers who saw it raved about it, so, unlike with several other touchstone made-for-TV efforts whose daring and/or scary attributes that we all bonded over in mutual kindertrauma, I felt left out. But now I have seen it and I'm glad to say it's a solid little entry-level shocker. As it was made for television, it features no gore, nudity, or profanity, and only the most minimal of blood, so this would get a mild PG if submitted to the MPAA, but its tale of supernatural retribution is quite tense,and I could easily see it scaring the shit out of any under-10's who watched it. And the killer remains intriguingly ambiguous until the last moments, with a final reveal thankfully does not cop out. Available on Youtube.

 TV GUIDE ad for the movie.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024 - INTRO

It's the best month of the year again, so I once more clutter the internet with my musings on horror in general and scary movies and television in particular.

You know the drill. All areas of the genre are fair game, so I hope to bring to your attention items that you may know nothing about, plus looks at entries that have stood the test of time to become classics (for better or worse). So, don your witch's hat and dance nekkid in the local desecrated indigenous burial ground under the full moon while blasting the Ramones' "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement." It's a 31-day party, and you are cordially invited!

-the Dark Lord Buncheula

JACKPOT! (2024)

A winning lottery ticket unleashes complete and utter greed-fueled homicidal madness against the winner in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles.

I just watched JACKPOT! (2024) on Amazon Prime. Think IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD set in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles, with Awkwafina as Latie Kim, a wannabe actress who's the winner of a ten-billion dollar lottery, and the wrinkle in the rules of the game is that she has to make it to sundown to win the loot, but it's open season on her until then, as the person who kills her before sundown wins the lottery prize. Thus, the entire city loses its collective mind and literally every adult person is out to kill her. Pursued by hordes of greed-crazed maniacs, armed with pretty much anything they can grab, our heroine tries to survive a citywide relentless gauntlet of homicide with a mile-wide target on her back and her location tracked and broadcast by a drone. Her only chance of survival is the aid of Noel (John Cena), a hulking badass whose profession is keeping lottery winners alive so they collect on the prize.

It's a ridiculous movie, punctuated with endless mayhem and chases, and as such it's a fun enough live-action cartoon. I usually cannot stand Awkwafina, but I really enjoyed her in this, and the same can be said of Simu Liu as Louis Lewis, a rival professional protector of lottery winners who has a history of bad blood with nice guy Noel. John Cena is as lovably goofy as ever, and he solidly delivers with both the comedy and the ass-kicking.

 

Not a classic, but definitely worth a watch.

 

Promo image for the Amazing streaming release.

KYOSHIRO NEMURI: IN THE SPIDER'S LAIR (1968)

 

Anti-hero ronin Kyoshiro Nemuri (Raizo Ichikawa) confronts one of the most vile bitches in samurai cinema history. (I would call her the "hard C-word" and she would deserve it, but I am too much of a gentleman.)

After decades of hearing it touted as an all-time classic, I finally saw KYOSHIRO NEMURI: IN THE THE SPIDER'S LAIR, and maybe it was due to all the hype, but I have to admit that I was underwhelmed.

Also known as THE HUMAN TARANTULA, this 11th in the "Sleepy Eyes of Death" samurai series pits titular wandering anti-hero Kyoshiro Nemuri (Raizo Ichikawa), the red-haired son of a black mass conducted by Portuguese priests who raped his mother as part of the ritual, against a brother and sister pair of unspeakably sadistic sociopaths who keep a dungeon full of innocent villagers whom they haul out and murder in cruel ways for their amusement. Nemuri is a particularly nihilistic take on the samurai protagonist, as he owes allegiance to no one and basically doesn't give a shit about anyone or anything, so little that he does is noble or heroic. He's a rather unlikable sort, but even he recognizes that the evil siblings need killing, and the path to that ultimate resolution features a very high body count indeed, though not punctuated with spewing gallons of arterial spray like in the LONE WOLF AND CUB or HANZO THE RAZOR flicks. 

The film is well-crafted and acted, but somehow I just could not connect with Nemuri or really care about anything in the narrative, other than seeing the bad guys get what was coming to them, and when they finally do meet their well-earned fates, it was nowhere near as cathartic as their deaths deserved to be. The brother and sister are two of the worst villains in a genre that's packed with utter scumbags for antagonists, so them being as nasty as they are and standing out as exemplars of soulless cruelty as much as they do is really saying something and may be a key element to why this entry is so revered. And make no mistake, Nemuri is a slayer who litters the landscape with bodies, so there's certainly no skimping on the sword-slashing action. It may just be that between the time I first heard about this film and its lofty rep and the present, I have seen perhaps 200 samurai films of wildly varying quality, several of which are all-time favorites that I will eagerly revisit, even the ones that concentrate more on drama than sword fights and gory violence (1960's BENTEN KOZO being a prime example) involved me way more than this one did. For me, it was worth sitting through once, just to see it. 

I have previously seen the first entry in the series, but it was a long time ago and its details have faded from memory, though I do recall finding Nemuri's inaugural adventure to be an interesting character study of a protagonist who is pretty much the antithesis of the heroic ronin ideal. My lukewarm response to IN THE SPIDER’S LAIR notwithstanding, I am quite willing to give the rest of the Kyoshiro Nemuri outings a chance. In fact, I welcome the opportunity.

 

Poster from the original Japanese theatrical release.

SUPERBAD (2007)

NOTE: This originally ran on THE VAULT OF BUNCHENESS in 2007.

By now you’ve probably heard about how great SUPERBAD is — and for the most part I agree with the majority of the critics — so I’ll spare you the details save for the plot in a nutshell: two best friends and a dorky classmate find themselves saddled with the task of obtaining $100 worth of liquor for a party thrown by a hot girl that one of them likes, and using that catalyst for a springboard all manner of insanity ensues. It’s basically every last-shot-at-high school-fun-before-we-go-to-college story you’ve ever seen, only with the raunch factor amped up to the the level one would expect from a post-AMERICAN PIE (1999) outing for the genre, but it’s a lot funnier than AMERICAN PIE and, with the very notable exception of the two most irresponsible and over-the-top cops seen onscreen in years, SUPERBAD is a dead-on accurate look at what suburban American teenagers, especially the males, can get up to when having their youthful adventures.

That said, I’d like to discuss the thing that really puts SUPERBAD into the firmament of teen movie classics: the awesome majesty that is McLovin.

Christopher Mintz-Plasse plays Fogell, the very definition of the word “Nerd” and a truly grating presence that one would avoid in the halls of the high school when not kicking his dorky ass on general principle.

Even the other two main characters who hang out with him on a regular basis can’t stand him much, but that all changes when he acquires a fake ID that identifies him a twenty-five-year-old resident of Hawaii named “McLovin.” No first name, just McLovin, and as if that weren’t ridiculous enough he doesn’t look a day over fifteen despite being about two months shy of becoming a college freshman. Upon adopting the McLovin moniker, Fogell is pressed into doing the actual purchasing of the required liquor, but the instant he whips out his ID and actually convinces the cashier of his alleged age, the poor dork gets sucker-punched by a thug who makes off the with the contents of the cash register. When a pair of goofball cops arrive to investigate, they take him under their wing for what turns into what can only be called a young heterosexual male’s perfect fantasy night come true; over the next few hours McLovin hangs out and drinks in a bar with his newfound policeman pals, collars a drunk and disorderly bum, gets chauffeured around town in a police car with the cops getting him and themselves more and more wasted with each passing hour,

hooks up with the other two characters — who ditched him when they thought the cops were arresting him and ended up having their own adventures — makes it to the big party with the liquor he purchased, gets (mostly) laid by the cute redhead he’d admired from school — lets put it this way: he gets it in, but the cops bust the party and while searching the house for underage drinkers they bust in on McLovin getting’ some, which causes his very willing partner to flee, for which the cops are deeply apologetic — leaves the party in a style that makes him an instant legend, and finishes the evening by helping the cops torch their own now-totaled squad car while using it for target practice.

If all of this sounds incredibly puerile and sophomoric, it certainly is, but its hilarity lies in the telling and the making-of-an-urban-legend nature of McLovin’s saga; Joseph Campbell — the late sage behind THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES and THE POWER OF MYTH — would have had a field day with this modern heroic journey that traces a callow youth’s progression from inexperience to capable adulthood and coolness within the space of one night’s whirlwind of adventure, complete with wise (?) guide-figures in the form of the fun-loving and somewhat insane cops, a couple of monsters (the thug and the bum), the getting of all sorts of wisdom, and actually winning the girl of his dreams. That’s the stuff of the straight-up, classically defined heroic journey archetype, and it was fun to see it told in such a way; it actually eclipses the more realistic exploits of Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) in DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993), and as that was a hell of a story in its own right, that’s something to be proud of, Jack! And since the SUPERBAD is making a mint at the box office, it’ll probably spawn a shitty sequel and that would be a shame because the magic of McLovin is not something that can just be shat out by the studio assembly line.

McLovin: one superbad motherfucker.

As for the rest of the flick, SUPERBAD is a very solid piece of entertainment, but its raunchiness reminded me of the anarchic and unbelievably tasteless stories found in issues of NATIONAL LAMPOON that I adored when I was growing up (or not), a cornucopia of humor that was the antithesis of everything PC. So if you aren’t of a sensibility that can handle foul dialogue, drunken tomfoolery, gross-out bodily humor — most notably the felonious and hilarious misuse of one of the protagonist’s legs that’s sure to polarize the women in the audience as to whether the gag was funny or not — and young people painfully embarrassing themselves, then you might want to give SUPERBAD a miss. Otherwise, get ready to smile at a film that just may drag you on a beer-soaked, hormonally charged trip down memory lane.

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH (1976)

 Boys will be boys: an attempted gang rape in an empty classroom. 

So, after first hearing about it some 42 years ago, I finally saw MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH (1976)

Somewhere in southern California, David (Derrel Maury), a new student, comes to Central High and reconnects with Mark (Andrew Stevens), an old friend whom he once helped out of a bad situation. Mark seeks to repay that kindness by bringing David into his clique, but David immediately discovers his old friend's crew are the school bullies, a trio of rich, entitled bastards who keep the entire student body in check via relentless intimidation, cruelty, and violence. Over the course of a few days, David observes both the oppressors and the oppressed and makes up his mind to steer clear of Mark and his buddies.

The bullies take umbrage at David's disrespect of them, but before they can do anything about it they decide to rape two female classmates whose close friendship leads the bullies to believe they're lesbians, so the lads decide to "teach them something." The girls get hauled into an empty classroom and are about to be brutally assaulted when David arrives, already brimming with anger and hatred for the bullies, and he hands the trio a righteous clobbering. (Mark, sensing what his cronies were planning, opted out.) Butthurt over their beating, the bullies plot revenge against David, lest word get around that he handed them their asses in no uncertain terms. The bullies cripple David by dropping the car he was repairing on his leg, thus ending his anger-managing hobby of running.

After a stay in the hospital, David returns to school with a pronounced limp, and it is revealed that he didn't implicate the bullies in his hobbling, for which the leader of the bullies thanks David, to which David ominously responds with "Ratting people out isn't my style." In short order, David cleverly assassinates the three bullies in ways that appear to be accidents, so he will not be suspected by the authorities. 

 

Assassination Number 1: a clipped control wire sends a bully's hang glider into live high tension wires. ZAP!!! 

Assassination Number 2: a bully high dives into the school's swimming pool in the dark, not realizing that the pool was drained for maintenance. CRUNCH!!!

Assassination Number 3: the remaining bully is trapped in his surfer van and the van is rolled over a cliff, from which it tumbles to its explosive doom. KABOOM!!!

However, it's obvious to all of his schoolmates that David was the author of the bullies' gruesome demises, and they are grateful for being liberated from their serial tormentors. But now that the power dynamic has shifted, several of the formerly-victimized now seek to fill that vacuum themselves, proving that they are just as bad as those who tormented them. Nerds, the handicapped, hippies, and. even some of the girls all approach David to join with them as the figurehead of what they seek to establish as the school’s new order, but all David sees is a new group of vicious assholes replacing the previous, so all that’s left to do is exterminate the lot of them, which he does, again in ways that will not implicate him, with the demolition of the school serving as his final measure to end the bullshit once and for all…

MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH is a movie that could never get made today, for obvious reasons, and it enjoyed a heavy cult reputation during the ’70’s and ’80’s. Though bearing the look and feel of a made-for-TV movie from its era, it features enough cursing, sex and nudity, and R-rated violence to make it a grindhouse perennial, and it surprises by having more of a brain in its head than one would think. The main bullies are all dead by the end of the second act, so the third act examines how the student body vies for power in the wake of the bullies’ deaths, and it also makes it clear that we should not be rooting for mark, no matter how satisfying his kills are, because he’s very obviously shown to be a calm and methodical merciless sociopath who will kill without a shred of remorse. Oh, and look for appearances by exploitation stalwart Bainbeaux Smith, whose elfin blonde nudity is always a welcome sight, and a young pre-REVENGE OF THE NERDS Robert Carradine.

It’s all very bleak stuff, but I have to say that I would have loved it if I had seen it anytime during my years in grades 7-12. I endured bullying from some sadistic kids during those years, and as Black kid in Westport I could not fight back without risking litigation from my bullies’ parents or ending up thrown in jail by the town’s racially profiling cops. The last thing my already stressed-out mother needed was me going to jail, so I just had to take it until the eventual graduation released me from my education system jail sentence. A movie like this would have been my vengeance fantasy writ large, and I'm kind of sad that it took me so long to finally get around to seeing it. Good stuff, and it’s available for uncensored on YouTube Premium and Amazon Prime Video.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

 

ON SEEING THE BEAST MASTER (1982) 42 YEARS LATER

Autographed photo of Marc Singer, aka Dar the Beastmaster. He was one of the nicest and mostpersonable of the many celebrities I met over the years. A solid dude.
 

Last night I watched THE BEAST MASTER (1982) for the first time since seeing it in the theater when it came out. Back in '82 I found it to be merely passable, with a hero who came across as a tad softer than testosterone-fueled beef slabs like Ah-nuld or Dolph Lundgren, and I found that a welcome change of pace. The story was a by-the-number sword 'n' sorcery yarn that offered little or nothing out of the ordinary, save for the protagonist's ability to communicate with and command animals, but it was a decent enough way to kill a needlessly overlong two hours. (The story could have been told more briskly if edited down to 90 minutes.)

 

Unlike most folks who know of this movie, I never watched it during its years of ubiquity on HBO — that cable network ran the film so often, its initials were snarkily referred to as "Hey, Beastmaster's On!" — and other platforms, but over the decades I discovered that it has a massive cult following among those who watched it over and over again starting from childhood. I was seventeen when it came out and I had already seen far superior sword 'n' sorcery flicks, plus a few really bad ones that I love for their hilarious cheapjack awfulness (I'm looking at you, SORCERESS), so for me experiencing that one time in the theater and not being all that impressed by it was all that I needed. Nonetheless, THE BEASTMASTER endured in the hearts and minds of its fans, and nine years later it spawned a sequel, BEASTMASTER 2: THROUGH THE PORTAL OF TIME, which I saw on opening night during the dying days of Times Square's plethora of grindhouse movie theaters, and I recall enjoying that followup considerably more than the original. A made-for-TV third film, BEASTMASTER III: THE EYE OF BRAXUS, followed, and after that a syndicated series. Such is the power of post-theatrical cable-driven cult afterlife.

 

And now, after sitting through it again over forty years later, I still think THE BEASTMASTER is middling at best, but this time around I also noted that save for a few shots of exposed tiddies and a couple of scary moments, It's pretty much a barbarian movie for kids, which goes a long way in explaining why it's held with such fondness by those who grew up with it in the same way that I cherish ULTRAMAN. It's not bad, but kids are famously forgiving of a film's shortcomings if it's giving them a genre or concepts that they'd never previously encountered, so there you go.