31 DAYS OF HORROR 2016-Day 21: PIRANHA (2010)

A lovely day at the beach.

Cribbing its title and basic "chew 'em up" thrust from the 1978 cult item of the same name, PIRANHA has nothing on its mind but giving the audience that likes this kind of thing exactly what it wants: a shit-ton of vicious gore spurred by carnivorous fish, accented with copious amounts of buck nekkid tiddies and buttsteak. The beauty of this particular serving of such delights is that it was crafted by people who understood just what kind of movie they were making and were in on the gag.

The story relates the dire events following an earthquake that unleashes a massive number of prehistoric piranha upon the unsuspecting drunk and horny attendees of Spring Break in the fictional town of Lake Victoria, with the plot knowingly eschewing deep character development in favor of sheer fun ultra-gory humor. The principals include the sheriff (Elizabeth Shue), her partner (Ving Rhames), her kids (a teenage son and two pre-teen siblings), a couple of porn stars (I'll get to them presently), and their super-sleazy "girls gone wild"-style boss, a pornographer played to the hilt of amusing loathsomeness by Jerry O'Connell.

Jerry O'Connell primes Riley Steele for tequila body shots.

The plot borrows from several notable films in the "carnivorous fish eat the living shit out of everybody in sight" genre (including a terrific cameo role by Richard Dreyfuss as pretty much Matt Hooper from JAWS) but never once feels like a ripoff because it uses its antecedents as fodder for lampooning that notches the insanity up to "11." You get the water populated by revelers who won't listen to the warnings of the authorities and people being eaten as they engage in assorted aquatic fun (as seen in pretty much every JAWS movie), folks stranded on a dodgy seafaring craft that's only moments away from allowing the hungry fish access to the strandees (think JAWS 2), and crazy set pieces in which bathers are eagerly devoured in glorious displays of arterial spray and mangled carnage, only with said gore and carnage piled on to a ludicrous degree, resulting in a final twenty minutes in which all hell breaks loose (and then some).

Jet skis, shotguns, ravenous fish...sheer bliss.

In other words, a perfect example of this specific genre, a roller coaster of waaaay over the top lunacy that solidly delvers on all counts.

I won't give away the plot particulars because it's all simply a more intelligent and intentionally funny take on stuff we've seen countless times since JAWS hit in 1975 and you could pretty much write most of it yourself, but I will stop to point out one sequence that literally stopped me in my tracks. There's a bit where the pornographer sets off on a yacht to film his two porn star companions performing a nude underwater ballet in swim fins that evokes images of sensuous mermaids performing fluid arabesques unhampered by the constraints of gravity. This moment of stunning gorgeousness is a painstakingly choreographed submerged pas de deux brought to vivid life by British model and actress Kelley Brook and porn actress Riley Steele and it must have been a visual knockout when seen projected in 3-D.

The awe-inspiring "mermaid ballet" sequence: an instant classic moment in world cinema.

While the sequence certainly has its exploitative aspect, it's kind of odd because although it provides loving glimpses of just about every millimeter of the actresses' nubile flesh, the action is tasteful — digital shading eliminated any shots that would have been too gynecological in nature — and the musical accompaniment, the familiar "Lakme-Flower Duet," renders the visual truly compelling. It's a moment of genuine artful beauty in a film otherwise populated with looniness and people being ripped apart by slavering CGI piranha that must have been amazing in its original 3-D version, and I thank French director Alexandre Aja for every frame of it. And yes, I'm being completely sincere.

The simple sensuous beauty of the human female form as seen in action underwater.

And while the blonde of the pair (Steele) is certainly easy on the eyes, it's Kelly Brook whose goddesslike form and face nearly made my peepers fall out of their sockets since there is now little worth seeing after witnessing her at all, much less unabashedly and confidently naked.

The wonder of nature that is Kelly Brook. Jumping Jesus in a basket of honey-glazed chicken...

I'm assuming her Euro upbringing left her without the squeamishness regarding onscreen nudity that most American actresses bear, so she gets extra points for being so game about it all. Then again, if I were a woman and looked like her, I would never wear clothes, simply on general principle. In fact, there should be an internationally-agreed-upon law forbidding Brook from ever being clad, unless it's really cold or something. And adding to this excellence is the fact that she's funny and can act!

Bottom line: PIRANHA is is a ton of fun if you have a taste for this flavor of cinematic excess, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Its content is about as extreme as it gets for a film with an "R" rating, and I would like to know who was asleep at the usually stringent MPAA ratings board the day this one came up for consideration. (According to the director's commentary, the film was passed without cuts, and if that's true, I'm frankly astounded.) Damn, I wish I'd seen this on the big screen and in 3-D!

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2016-Day 20: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008)

A valid question...

In an odd twist of cinematic fate, 2008, the year when the movie version of TWILIGHT hit,  also saw the release of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, a Swedish take on the “boy meets girl and one of them is a vampire” chaste love story thing, but that film could not be more different from TWILIGHT if it tried to. Whereas TWILIGHT strove to be a pop confection for tweens that worked within the conventions of the relatively family-friendly high school narrative genre, although with fantastic elements thrown into the mix, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (also based on a novel) is immeasurably more bleak and examines a bond born of desolate loneliness rather than gazing-out-the-window dreaminess.

Taking place near Stockholm in 1982, the story revolves around the relationship between twelve-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a quiet and rather solitary boy who is tormented by some cruel schoolmates in an escalating wave of sadistic bullying, and the mysterious Eli (Lina Leandersson), a sad-eyed girl who moves into the apartment next to where Oskar lives. Noting her arrival in the middle of the night with a man we’re meant to think is her dad, Oskar sees the girl move in and notices that Eli’s windows are immediately blocked with cardboard to prevent the sunlight shining in (not-so-subtle clue Number One). The two adolescents meet one dark, frigid night as Oskar sits in his apartment complex’s sparse playground and Eli shows up in attire more appropriate for a spring day rather than the kind of gear necessary for survival in snowbound Sweden. That’s unusual enough, but Eli also displays a physical nimbleness that’s not quite normal, a trait that does not go unnoticed by Oskar, but he doesn’t care so long as he has someone his age to talk to.

When the unnatural collides with soul-deep loneliness.

As soon as Eli moves in, murders begin in which the victims are drained of their blood, first by what looks to be a serial killer and later some kind of wild animal, but it soon becomes apparent that Eli is a vampire and Oskar is at first kind of shocked by that discovery. But he has come to know and care for the sad-eyed girl, valuing her friendship over his understandable fear of her feeding habits. Several complications arise during all of this, but chief among them is the fallout once Oskar heeds Eli’s advice and violently fights back against the leader of his tormentors, an act that snowballs to a conclusion that would have been horrifying even without the presence of a vampire…

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is less of a horror story than an examination of how two lonely souls find each other in the middle of a literal wasteland, and the two young stars could not have been better cast. Neither kid is a fantasy glamour figure a la a film made here in the States, both looking as ordinary and awkward as kids their age should be, and that factor helps sell the believability of the narrative. While Oskar clearly has feelings for Eli, he is perfectly happy to be with her in a non-sexual way because the connection he experiences with her goes beyond the merely hormonal; it’s a meeting of hearts and minds that is deeply affecting and genuine, unlike anything I saw in TWILIGHT, and the film’s icy location and deliberately slow pacing punctuate the “life” embodied in the relationship of the two kids. Though physically twelve, Eli has been twelve “for a long time,” and the film makes it clear that her un-life has been one long stretch of misery and isolation, constantly moving so she won’t be discovered, so when she befriends Oskar despite her own declaration that it would best for both of them if they were not friends, it has real meaning, and while Eli had her own needs, if ever there was someone who needed a friend, it was Oskar.

One item of particular note is a sequence where Oskar sees Eli changing clothes and catches a brief and innocent glimpse of her crotch, but when I saw the scene I said to myself, “What the hell was that? Is that scarring?” Thanks to the magic of the DVD player’s remote I was able to freeze-frame the shot and given a severe case of the crawlies when I saw clearly that Eli’s female bits appeared to have been mutilated and long healed-over, but no explanation was forthcoming. I did some research and found that in the source novel at some time in the past Eli was the victim of a particularly nasty vampire lord who delighted in cruelty such as manually emasculating young boys… You do the math. That bit of information added a whole new element of tragedy to her story and I wonder why the filmmakers decided to leave it out. Perhaps they not incorrectly assumed a mutilated pubescent pubic area was bad enough and just left it at that… Whatever the case, I’m now interested in reading the book to see what else was excised or changed for the screen.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is an excellent film but don’t buy all the review quotes about it being “one of the essential vampire movies” or “one of the best horror films ever made.” As previously stated, the film is more of a character study than anything else and as such it’s great. However, there are no scares to speak of, at least not in the sense that American audiences expect, and the gore is tastefully minimal, being almost totally related to Eli’s feeding, so don’t even think about recommending this to any gorehounds you may know. Well, maybe you should, provided they’re willing to give a chance to a “horror” film that’s all about the slow-paced story allowing the viewer to get to know its characters. BOTTOM LINE: if you're going to choose one of the similarly-themed 2008-releasse suckface romances, go with the Swedish one.

Poster from the U.S. release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2016-Day 19: TWILIGHT (2008)

Oh, fuck you.

For those who somehow missed it, the TWILIGHT phenomenon hinges on the chaste romance between a teenage girl and a vampire boy, and considering how such stuff could be handled on film I expected a movie that, to paraphrase my dear friend Raven Woman, would make me menstruate. Indeed the film is geared to fuel the fantasies of twelve-to-fourteen-year-old females and I am in no way its target audience, but I was surprised to find myself not hating it for the first hour or so and enjoying it as a kinda/sorta WB-flavored high school yarn. It’s all about pasty-but-pretty Bella (Kristen Stewart) moving in with her dad in some overcast Washington state town and starting over at a new high school while her mom and mom’s baseball-playing hubby move to Florida to facilitate said hubby’s baseball career. Now the new kid in school, Bella falls in with a bunch of generic movie/TV high school kids (about whom the less said, the better) but finds her head turned by hunky and also-pale-as-a-stick-of-chalk-in-a-blizzard Edward (Robert Pattison), who happens to be a vampire, albeit a vamp whose family follow a code of not feeding on humans, thus making him relatively harmless (translation: a big, sensitive pussy, and I don’t mean the kind found in “tenderloin” cinema).

It takes Bella most of the film’s first hour to suss out that Edward’s a revenant suckface and it’s kind of interesting getting to that moment of realization, but once that big reveal takes place the movie loses all interest and careens down the toilet at near superluminal speed. There are endless close-ups of longing gazes and meaningful glances with not even a dry hump to be had, and I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but the girls I knew growing up who were of this film’s target age definitely enjoyed moments of erotic adventuring that were light-years more advanced than this story’s imagined-by-an-eight-year-old (or a Mormon housewife) romantic scenarios. Come to think of it, many of the girls I knew at that age had already graduated to intra-vaginal fingering with eager young bohunks, the kind providing of bare tit and beyond, and most of them were what anyone would consider to be “nice” or “girl next door” archetypes. But those were also the days just before herpes and AIDS, so I guess it was a theoretically more consequence-free era. Keeping that in mind, I had a very hard time buying into TWILIGHT’s post-millennial innocence.

Excluding the film’s dose of narrative Salt Peter, the sequences that turned me against the movie were the annoying “meet the family” moment when Edward brought Bella home to introduce her to his fellow undead, the idiotic bit that explained why the vamps don’t like to be seen in broad daylight — do NOT get me started on vampires being able to walk about in broad daylight at all, let alone what happens when they do.

WORD.

In fact, that scene is so stupid and awful that it must be seen to be believed — and the incredibly painful bit in which Edward and family bring Bella along for a family game of baseball involving vampiric superpowers. There’s also a subplot involving a trio of suckfaces who merrily feed on human prey, but even their potential to liven things up falls flat and the lone member of the trio who proves to be a direct threat to Bella (in this installment anyway) is really only there to ensure Bella and Edward’s bonding. Thanks, dude. Thanks ever so much.

The film culminates in a fashion that can best be described as “My Vampire Prom Date,” and when all is said and done, TWILIGHT proves to be a cloying abstinence parable that removes the lusty elements that make many vampire stories appealing. But, again, I am not this film’s audience, so my opinion of it is definitely moot. I don’t recommend it for the majority of grownups of either gender or sexual orientation, but that’s merely my opinion. And don’t forget I’ve been known to enjoy “girly” fare quite a bit, such as ENCHANTED, THE CUTTING EDGE, SAVE THE LAST DANCE, EVER AFTER and ELLA ENCHANTED, so I’m not just trying to hate on the femme stuff.

Again, WORD.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2016-Day 18: AVALANCHE SHARKS (2013)

Yes, you really are seeing this.

In the 1850's a Native American community was massacred in order to make room for white men who were caught up in Gold Rush fever, and their shaman called upon Skookum, their god of vengeance, to settle the score. Skookum unleashed spirit Great White sharks that swam through the snow and devoured their enemies, and now, in the year of 2013, they are back and just as ravenous as ever.

Apparently made to cash in on the already ludicrous SHARKNADO phenomenon, AVALANCHE SHARKS gives us everyone's favorite marine carnivores and moves them to the slopes of a ski resort, where they spend eighty-two minutes munching on twenty-somethings who are obnoxious enough but too old to be the cast of any given FRIDAY THE 13th installment. And while all of that's going on, the filmmakers even manage to rip off JAWS by throwing in a mayor who doesn't want to close the resort because it would curtail seasonal profits.

The vengeance of Skookum.

Now, I've seen some stupid movies in my time, but the idea of sharks rampaging at a ski resort is certainly something new and extra-stupid, so my hat is off to AVALANCHE SHARKS for that, if for no other reason. It's competently made and entertaining enough to hold the viewer's attention, but there's a ton of ultra-boring padding before things get bloody, and when things do get crazy, the gore and mayhem are as cheap and cheesy as possible.

JAWS this ain't. Hell, it ain't even LAST SHARK!

While the SHARKNADO movies entertain because of their towering intentional stupidity, AVALANCHE SHARKS gives it the old college try but only manages to come off as a tepid time-waster. For shark completists only, this is a novel and goofy concept that swiftly fizzles out once one is over the basic setup's joke. You miss little if you skip this one.

Oh, and while there is an avalanche, it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the sharks. It just happens and then is immediately forgotten.

Art from the DVD release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2016-Day 17: NEVER CRY WEREWOLF (2007)

When you see a publicity photo like this, you know exactly what you're in for.

I thought I'd seen the nadir of derivative genre clonings when I endured the fabtasy confection that was ERAGON (2006) but, boy howdy, was I ever unprepared for NEVER CRY WEREWOLF, an almost impossibly-shameless ripoff/remake of the excellent 1985 vampire classic FRIGHT NIGHT, only minus all of that film's wit and originality, and each instance of vampiric lore replaced with every werewolf trope in the book. In fact, it's such a fucking swipe-job that I laughed out loud throughout its running time and repeatedly uttered "You've gotta be fucking kidding me!' at the screen as the bald-faced knockoff unspooled. In other words, it's almost worth seeing because its shamelessness is hilarious.

Note that I said "almost."

FRIGHT NIGHT told the story of an awkward teenager who realizes his personable new next-door neighbor is actually a vampire, and with the help of his at-first-disbelieving girlfriend and weirdo/dork best friend sets out to stop the supernatural predator before the vampire kills him. During the course of this mishegoss, the kid also enlists the services of a washed-up TV personality to aid in his errand of execution and all hell breaks loose in the finale. Everything you just read in the my FRIGHT NIGHT capsule synopsis occurs in NEVER CRY WEREWOLF, as well as assorted minor plot details such as the teen spying on the monstrous neighbor and witnessing the creature killing a hooker, the washed-up TV celebrity — in this case HERCULES: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS' Kevin Sorbo subbing for Roddy McDowall — being confronted with shocking evidence that monsters really do exist and the monster putting the lead's significant other in their hellish thrall, with the only real difference of note being that the monster's a werewolf (who resembles a defective gene-splicing of Gary Sinise and Hugh Jackman) and the protagonist is a girl. The whole damned thing is ridiculous and even though FRIGHT NIGHT successfully trod the often thin and uneven line between comedy and outright horror, NEVER CRY WEREWOLF fails to provide either intentional laughs of legitimate scares, so you, the viewer, lose. TRUST YER WEREWOLF-LOVIN' BUNCHE and give this waste of time and film stock a miss and instead check out a werewolf movie actually worth watching, namely Neil Marshall's instant classic from 2002, the superb DOG SOLDIERS.

And one last thing: exactly how did the makers of this film get away with so flagrantly ripping off FRIGHT NIGHT and not get the living shit sued out of them?

The DVD box art.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2016-Day 16: MOON DANCE (1989) by S.P. Somtow

NOTE: This is another oldie retrieved from the archives of my primary blog, but I fish it out again because it totally fits in with the series and describes a book that every serious fan of quality horror should read.

-Yer Bunche

I'd heard of this described both as "the Great American werewolf novel" and also "the GONE WITH THE WIND of lycanthropy," so as a fan of lycanthropes how could I not be intrigued?

Somtow crafts an epic tale of European immigrants coming to the dying Wild West in hope of setting up a colony where their community of werewolves can hunt and thrive without being hunted to extermination by normal humans, but what they don't take into account is that the area they've chosen might already be home to another community of shape-shifters, this time of the Injun variety. Anyone who's read a western novel or seen a western movie in the past forty years knows that situation will lead to a clash of native spiritualism and European devaluing and destruction of a "lower" culture, and that's exactly what this book is about.

This epic unfolds amid a framing device where a young writer in 1963 seeks out a mental institution in South Dakota that's home to an aged inmate with multiple personalities who committed a series of hideous psycho-sexual murders, violent atrocities that earned him infamy as "the Laramie Ripper." As the writer interviews the madman, she discovers that he, or rather one of his personalities, was prophesied by the shapeshifting Shungmanitou tribe as a messiah who would bridge the gap between man and beast and heal the world in the process. But the road to that clearly failed mission is a long, hard and cruel odyssey of genocide, unbridled racial hatred, scads of brutal western-style violence — i.e. loads of shootings, scalpings, torture and rape — Native American metaphysics and examinations of exactly what may or may not separate man from beast, all populated with a cast where every single character is earmarked for some sort of tragedy.

MOON DANCE is first and foremost a western on an operatic scale, and if not for the lycanthropy hook it would have been a straight-up downer western to rival SOLDIER BLUE (although much better written). It is utterly unflinching in its depiction of a filthy, nasty west whose spirit is being ravaged by the juggernaut of Western Expansion and the decimation of indigenous peoples (and the Chinese, in sequences that are genuinely stomach-turning), and the violence and gore will no doubt be extremely off-putting to some readers (but not me, lemme tell ya!).

The other element that might not sit well with some is the rather sensible depiction of the habits and behaviors of the werewolves, both Eurotrash and Injun, which includes such wolflike traits as relentless scent-marking (even when in human form), disturbing displays of dominance that are equivalent to rape and torture (depending on how one looks at it), and the powerful and visceral effect that certain smells have in causing sexual arousal in the werewolves and the humans caught helplessly in their thrall. The description of a redheaded female werewolf's shameless presenting of her befurred, menstrually-dripping nether parts to a cavalry officer she seeks to mark as hers is at once utterly revolting and highly erotically charged (the bit where she pretty much paints his face is so graphic that you'll damned near feel like it's happening to you), so if grotty imagery of human and inhumanly bestial shape-shifters engaging in all kinds of ultra-animalistic sexual shenanigans disturbs you, I suggest you give this one a miss.

MOON DANCE is extremely well written and is much better than many horror stories I've read, especially those featuring werewolves — my favorite archetypal monster, but they always get the shit end of the stick when it comes to fiction, although the wolves in this book probably wouldn't balk at a doody-covered stick — and its epic length is definitely worth making one's way through. My only real caveat is that it's a major downer from start to finish, and even the bright spots that really communicate the sacred and beautiful connection between the shape-shifters and the natural order of things cannot lift the tale's inevitable and depressing conclusion. We know what happened to the Indians in real life so you already know how this story ends, but the storytelling magic lies in the book's ability to compel as we journey along with the characters to a bleak oblivion.

And if there is a Hell for fictional characters, I sincerely hope that both the incredibly evil and sadistic Cordwainer Claggart and United States Cavalry Colonel Sanderson are suffering an enduring and vitriolic torment for the agonizes they wrought upon many characters in this book. Both are among the most heinous villains I've ever encountered in literature, and they will leave an indelible mark upon any who read MOON DANCE.
Lastly, what with Hollywood mining all corners for movie fodder, I strongly doubt that MOON DANCE could ever be successfully translated to the big screen with its spirit and intent intact for a number of reasons. Its scope alone would prove cost-prohibitive, and then there are the understandably touchy depictions of Native American genocide — something covered to nigh-unwatchable effect in SOLDIER BLUE — and the ultra-gory ravaging and gleeful disembowelings perpetrated by the werewolves. The assorted acts of cruelty and gender-regardless rape and torture committed by Claggart and Sanderson would push this straight into instant NC-17 territory, even if handled with restraint (how?), and don't even get me started on all the territorial pissing (even on people) and wolf/human sex... The MPAA's collective head would explode!

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2016-Day 15: THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES (1968)

You know you're in trouble when an alleged horror movie opens with a bunch of wind-up toy robots and tanks bumping into each other as the credits lists the perpetrators.

Sometimes this whole 31 Days of Horror exercise is a real cross to bear. Every now and then my film-reviewing duties throw me under the bus that is a truly bad movie, and I write this while healing from injuries sustained upon being flattened by THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES. 

After getting the axe from the space agency, scientist John Carradine crafts bootleg "astro-men" from plans stolen from a colleague. Intended for space exploration, the astro-men are remote-controlled human/machine hybrids whose human components are culled from murdered civilians or car accident victims, and for no apparent reason (or maybe I was so bored that I missed the explanation) they occasionally escape from the scientist's lab and embark on a mindless murder spree.

One of the titular creatures goes to work.

While the space agency lugubriously investigates the murders, they also become aware that a spy ring  headed by big-titted cult icon Tura Satana (FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!) seeks to obtain the plans to the astro-men and sell them to a foreign government. What ensues can barely be called a horror movie and instead drags us into the mire of late-1960's feeble would-be James Bondian espionage nonsense. Seriously, perhaps a fifth of the film is straight-up horror and the rest would not pass muster as a below-average third season episode of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.

Characters search in vain for a decent script.

 THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES features the sort of plot that would be ideal for introducing kids to the genre but its emphasis on the spy angle while claiming a pure horror pedigree fucks it right in the ass,  but the movie's cardinal sin is that it is incredibly boring. Loaded with un-involving secret agent shenanigans, long shots in the lab in which the camera stays rooted to the spot while nothing of interest happens, John Carradine spouting endless streams of meaningless techno-babble, and a marked paucity of scary mayhem, the film is an endurance test for even the most die-hard of bad horror movie masochists.

What I wish had happened to me instead of sitting through this turd.

Despite having a memorable title and having been co-written and co-produced by Wayne Rogers, aka "Trapper" John McIntyre from the television version of M.A.S.H., about the only good thing to come out of this film is that it inspired one of the Misfits' signature tunes.

Director Ted V. Mikels was a master of low-budget schlock, some of which was could be entertaining, such as GIRL IN GOLD BOOTS (1968), CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS and the THE DOLL SQUAD (both from 1973), but THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES is the cinematic equivalent to being forced to stare at a dead cat for 91 minutes. Life's just too short.

Poster from the original theatrical release.