The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

The Human Centipede is as bleak as a decent movie can get, and that is very much to its credit. I vividly recall the cultural hubbub that was The Human Centipede when it first reared its ugly head in 2009, and I found out about it through outraged and disgusted social media posts by friends. Of course, knowing me, when that much outrage has been generated, I simply have to see what all the fuss is about. On first viewing, I experienced the retching and hilarity that was expected, but years later, after two sequels have been made, and the Siamese triplet of a film series has been completed, I was surprised to see that it not only held up surprisingly well, but was a genuinely well done film.

Your basic premise is that two American girls, Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie), are on a European road trip, and for some reason are making their way down woodland roads en route to a nightclub. Well, their car breaks down, and they exchange some terribly delivered bitchery, while trudging through the rainy forest in shorts and high heels. They happen across the house of one Dr Josef Heiter, a retired specialist in separating conjoined twins. He promptly drugs the girls and intends to expand his surgical repertoire by creating a conjoined triplet that is connected via a single gastric system. In layman's terms, they are sewn mouth to ass. Also along for the worst ride since It's a Small World, is Akihiro Kitamura, who at least garners the privilege of being the front part of the centipede.

As a thoroughly cosmopolitan movie in terms of production, we are treated to no less than three spoken languages, and the version I just watched didn't have subtitles. This made for interesting viewing, particularly as I have previously seen subtitled versions, and know the gist of the dialogue, but mainly went by the emotions being conveyed. The good Herr Doktor does the girls (and the audience) the courtesy of mostly speaking English, but the general lack of communication between characters plays nicely into the idea of alien parts being thrust together.

Does this centipede taste funny to you?

I have noticed an interesting phenomenon within the small-time acting community: many an actor can play fear or hysteria quite well, but delivering natural, conversational dialogue seems beyond them. This is certainly the case for our two American leads, whose earlier scenes are poorly delivered, but are saved by strong direction and production values. However, the shining star of this dim and grimy production is Mr Dieter Laser, who was just made to play a part of this kind. His sinewy figure, soulless eyes and boundless physical delivery make for a sinister and utterly unpredictable villain.

What really struck me this time around about The Human Centipede was how well it conveyed total and utter hopelessness. In some ways, it feels like it belongs in the '70s with the other low budget, somewhat artistic exploitation horrors, in that it stirs the most basic of instincts in the audience, by tugging the nerve of vulnerability. The recurring shots of Jenny and Lindsay holding each other's hands in desperate mutual comfort are some of the many silent and bitterly poignant visuals used by writer/director Tom Six, who pulls off a deeply macabre atmosphere from beginning to end.

This movie is oddly absorbing, and it is easy for a new viewer to expect 90 minutes of faecal torture porn, but The Human Centipede is so much more than that, as becomes apparent after the whole 'eating shit' money shot has been and gone. In fact, the concept of being forced to not only eat the faeces of another person, but also to survive solely on it, is remarkably minimal as a focus of the narrative. The real horror comes in being put into such a horrific and vulnerable situation that requires a miraculous combination of team effort and good fortune to survive even for a day, and the idea that this is not a situation that will soon end with death, but could go on for a very long time.

Honestly, best shot of the entire movie

It is hard to ignore the evident inspiration (for lack of a better term) taken from Josef Mengele for Heiter's character. In fact, it would not surprise me if the likes of this movie took place in Mengele's basement somewhere in Brazil after the war. This connotation also forces us to remember that the likes of this gross movie are not merely the twisted imaginings of some Dutch nutter, but that humans have been devising cruel and unusual ways to punish each other since the dawn of time.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019)

Making films, music and literature based - either loosely or otherwise - on real events, and more specifically, on true crime, is far from a modern trend, and yet it is still a divisive topic on moral grounds. The better known serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, continue to inspire recreations of their lives and crimes, and the human condition of morbid curiosity keeps ensuring return on profit is seen. The question of whether it is ethical to rehash such crimes for 'entertainment purposes', and how such recreations can impact the survivors and their loved ones, continues to be asked, yet it seems to have little effect on the industry's production of such movies, or on audiences' viewing of them. Monster and The Girl Next Door are serious and well-made productions based to varying degrees on true crime, but for every Monster, there are easily a hundred The Haunting of Sharon Tate.

Critics have been slamming this movie for many reasons, and Lionsgate have been pulling out all of the damage control stops to ensure people still give their movie the benefit of the doubt. Not only is this not a well-made film, but it is a very inconsiderate one. It doesn't seek simply to recreate the crimes of the Manson family in 1969, but to put a supernatural twist on things, and perpetuate dismal rumours first circulated by the media mere hours after the news broke fifty years ago: talk of infidelities, open relationships and devil worship somehow being the cause of those events is tasteless and speculative at best. What, I ask you, could possibly be gained, or added to this story, by the suggestions of Roman Polanski (who is not portrayed onscreen in this movie) 'cheating' on his wife, or Gibby Folger and Wojciech Frykowski manipulating Sharon into a position of vulnerability? It drags this whole sorry tale to the depths of tabloid fodder in the least tactful way possible.

The media spin that continues to embody the Tate-LaBianca murders could be an interesting way to tell this story, but this is clearly not what the makers had in mind. If nothing else, its only real goals are to paint Sharon and her friends as people they were not, with an aim to add a sense of suspicion and tension that never existed. And this is not to say that this movie manages to achieve even the slightest feeling of suspense. It consists primarily of repetitive sequences of Sharon creeping wide-eyed around her dark house, convinced that she is in danger but for some reason doing nothing about it.

For some reason, Hilary Duff 'stars' as Sharon Tate, and we are suddenly and rudely reminded of why her repertoire never really expanded beyond Lizzie McGuire and being Steve Martin's stroppy teen daughter in Cheaper by the Dozen. She looks and sounds nothing like Sharon Tate, despite her fleeting attempts at some sort of regional accent. Duff is very strangely directed throughout this picture, in every way from accent to emotion and mindset. There are odd moments at which she seems to react to things in ways that just don't match the action, and her character's thought processes are sloppy. This heavily pregnant woman, whose several friends are literally in the next bedroom, keeps creeping around this dark house when she suspects intruders. No guns, no phone calls, she doesn't even turn on the lights or scream for someone. She just keeps skulking around in the dark.

The main narrative bookending this piece is what pissed me off the most. The movie opens in black and white, and purports to show us Sharon giving an interview in 1968. The interviewer asks her if she has ever had any experiences she considered psychic. Now this in itself is not crazy, as there was quite a trend for metaphysics, spirituality and psychedelia in the '60s and '70s, and this could have been an interesting approach in more competent hands. But Sharon responds that she had a nightmare in which she and her friends are murdered, which "I guess you could consider a psychic experience". We are given no other indication at this point in the story's timeline that could give weight to this idea that a simple bad dream is some form of premonition, and the narrative only seems to show Sharon come to recognise this much later on. This terribly contrived plot device is the frayed string from which the entire narrative precariously hangs.

Now when I did some basic research into this film (which I did when I got to this very point in writing my review), I made a striking discovery about the resume of writer/director Daniel Farrands. Not only is his filmography comprised almost entirely of horror sequels and true crime movies, but he actually wrote the aforementioned The Girl Next Door, which was a very good and considerately handled movie. Interestingly, that was more or less the first thing he wrote in twenty years, preceded by Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers in 1995. This in itself makes me wonder why and how Farrands' ability to craft believable dialogue that propels a difficult narrative seems to have evaporated. On top of this, his more recent credits include another dreadful Amityville movie, and production on an upcoming piece titled The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. There is a definite pattern there, which I might not take such a distaste to if not for Farrands' sharply declining standards. In 2007, he proved himself capable of taking a horrific true crime, dramatising it in a way that gives context to the behaviours of its characters, and approaching what is essentially an exploitation picture with utmost dignity, respect and care. Somehow, he is now a shadow of his former professional self.

Farrands' habit of running with the scrag ends of existing narratives smacks of commercial and artistic cynicism. He demonstrates little ability to create original material, and he has absolutely forgotten - or neglected - the way real people speak, which is so crucial to his line of work. Often when we hear of true crime stories, particularly those in which people are somehow convinced or manipulated into committing crime by others, the mind really boggles at how things get from A to B. What does a person have to say, and how do they have to say it, in order to get another person to commit such cruelty on innocents? With The Girl Next Door, Farrands showed us just how an evil adult could have manipulated neighbourhood children into torturing and killing a young girl, and it was his way with dialogue that made these unimaginable events believable. Now, he can't even convince us that a woman is trying to tell her friends she thinks she is being stalked. I mean damn, that's not a lot to ask of a writer who has previously shown his mettle with conveying difficult ideas on screen.

Although The Haunting of Sharon Tate is nowhere near as technically inept as I had expected it to be, it is just a sad, sorry and puzzling excuse of a film. A film doesn't have to be a masterpiece to be redeemable, but this is just the laziest form of 'retelling', and is not entertaining, scary, intriguing or compelling. As unethical as it can seem, it is undeniable that our nature as humans is to find curiosity in the extraordinary, in the things we don't see every day or have never seen before. Whether this is a motorway pileup or a murdered film star, we can't help but be fascinated. But there are so many elements of the Manson crimes that actually warrant elaboration and exploration, that don't disrespect the memories of the victims, and better filmmakers have explored these. Cult mentality, the transition to a life of crime, the death of a social movement; these are all insights that can be gained from these awful events that people can learn from. We gain nothing from 60 minutes of Hilary Duff creeping around in the dark and 25 minutes of crass crime scene recreation. This movie is utterly worthless.

Terrifier (2016)

Several years ago, I wrote here about a movie my sister got me for Christmas, having seen it at an LA film festival. I wrote about how Rell told me that it was the scariest movie she had ever seen, and how I concurred, and how I had actually had trouble sleeping the night I watched it. This movie was All Hallows Eve by Damien Leone.

In 2017, he made his second movie from the Art the Clown universe, entitled Terrifier. It is very clear from the off that Leone was working with a much higher budget this time around, as well as a more liberal deadline. All Hallows Eve was infamously amateur while being well made, and Terrifier is slicker, cleaner (so to speak) and more polished in its presentation, from framing to credits. The single element of the movie that jumped out at me was use of colour. The whole picture is perfectly coloured, with Art's black and white suit blending seamlessly into the nighttime shadows in an urban street. Every sequence is so aesthetically pleasing that it's as if it has been painted on a canvas rather than storyboarded, and in this way the movie is outstanding.

For putting me through this, you are the middle piece!

The narrative of Terrifier is entirely more conventional than that of its predecessor, with the entire film manifesting through a straight, chronological storyline captured by a traditional invisible camera. Because of this, and the lacklustre plot and action, Terrifier is underwhelming on the heels of the traumatising All Hallows Eve. It is not particularly scary, and of all things that I took away from what should have been a scary movie, it was "Wow, that use of colour was fabulous!" I mean, this movie is not trying to be a Tarantino or an Argento that expects the audience to say, "Wow, this disgusting violence is being presented in a very picturesque manner!" I have a feeling it was trying to be disturbing and gross, like the first movie was, but it just doesn't pull it off, despite a single sequence that was slightly darker than the rest of the movie was willing to be.

Apart from the blatantly higher production values, the other thing that slapped me right in the face within the first few minutes of Terrifier was that we were no longer dealing with the same Art the Clown. This Art is obviously trying to be the All Hallows Eve Art, as played by Mike Giannelli, but he is considerably skinnier, and is just... not... Art. I don't know why Giannelli didn't reprise the role that he played so menacingly, but this time round, David Howard Thornton is trying to carry the movie, and not managing to do so.

I thawt you was in a hurry!

Terrifier has its moments, in particular a demented sequence inspired by Buffalo Bill's darkest fantasies, but on the whole, it is an entirely conventional horror movie, and while it is artistically worthy of Damien Leone and his hard working crew, its narrative is not. Leone proved with his humble origins, from YouTube favourite short film maker, to learned devotee of horror with All Hallows Eve, and managed to creep out two hardcore horror fans, which is no mean feat. I see him developing a career like that of Adam Green: he may try his hand at other stories, but will probably continue to expand with Art the Clown on the indie circuit. He definitely has the craft and the passion, but I hope that for his next project, he develops a stronger scripts, and frames it as powerfully as he did with his first feature length film. I have my eye on this fellow.

Toy Story 4 (2019)

You know how I found out about the passing of veteran entertainer Don Rickles? I saw Toy Story 4 and noticed that Potato Head was present throughout, but only spoke a single line (off screen) the entire time. By the time the credits rolled, I was busy googling whether or not Rickles was still alive, and found my answer way before the brief post-credits dedication to his memory. Rickles died in 2017, by which time voice recording had not yet begun, and it would seem that Pixar decided the most graceful way to deal with this issue was to steal an unused sound byte from a previous instalment and simply tack it on. This move sets the bar for the entire movie, which left me angry in a way unlike any movie in recent (or even more distant) memory.

Having heard from critics I respect that Toy Story 4 held up surprisingly well, I went in with middling expectations and by the 30 minute mark, I was absolutely over this shit. What I was faced with was 90 minutes of live vivisection of a childhood icon. I hope that by the end of this diatribe, I have successfully expressed my disdain for this picture, and haven't been sidetracked by animalistic rage and many four-letter words.

Y'know partner, this used to be a respectable franchise.

Unlike every other chapter, Toy Story 4 does not begin with a fantasy action sequence, but with some incident in Andy's childhood in which RC is somehow getting sucked into a storm drain outside while a Gumtree user rocks up to the house to collect a lamp he has purchased, which is apparently where Bo Peep originates, despite us never having seen her act as part of a lighting appliance. We don't kinow how or why RC ended up outside in torrential rain, but it serves to give Woody and Bo an odd farewell scene. Flash to nine years later, and the toys are in the possession of Bonnie, as the third film left them. The less than likeable kid is about to start kindergarten and Woody tags along to make sure things go well. The kid creates a crude figurine out of a plastic spork, pipecleaners and lolly sticks, the aptly named Forky, and brings it home, where Woody sets about trying to teach the developmentally stunted creature to live as a toy.

Of course, the toys have to have an adventure away from home, so the kid's parents suggest a road trip. The retarded spork acts like someone's senile parent, constantly wandering off, and eventually throws itself from the RV window, prompting Woody to follow, assuring the other toys that he is entirely capable of catching them up at their destination five miles down the road. On foot; on toy foot. Of course this is stupid, but how else are we going to send Woody off on his latest wild goose chase?

The substance of the movie, if it can be called that, is so unforgivably lazy: the previous scores are recycled, with the addition of a single uninspired song by Randy Newman; scenarios veiled as homage directly rip off preceding chapters; the new characters are inconsistent and not at all relatable. Toy Story 3 was a retread of Toy Story 2 in terms of plot, but it still showed creativity, poignancy, humour and thematic strength. Toy Story 4 feels a lot like the family film equivalent of Game of Thrones Season 8: it is entirely disinterested in engaging our minds or emotions, takes half-assed shortcuts, and seems to think that its validity relies on their ability to remind us how good the previous instalments of the same story were. Hey, remember how awesome Randy Newman's music wqas? Here it is, literally all over again. Hey, remember how the toys launched themselves in a conga missile through the catflap of Sid's house in a rescue attempt? Here is pretty much the same thing all over again.

My face throughout this movie

All characters but Woody are resigned to the background. Buzz is occupied with a stupid and nonsensical microplot that hangs on conscience and voicebox being synonymous in the toy world; Jesse and Bullseye have absolutely nothing to do, and favourite bit players such as Potato Head and Rex may as well not even be there. Bo Peep is given an inexplicable makeover, from her voice, to her origins, to her physical makeup. She was previously an entirely porcelain figure, but now her clothes are made of fabric and are removable. Her sheep now have names, and she drives some sort of vehicle disguised as a skunk. She claims she has been living her best life as a free and independent woman for the last nine years, but later laments that she spent years gathering dust on the shelf of an antique store. Everything is so confused and nonsensical, and it made my blood boil to watch.

The villain of this piece is the most underdeveloped and unstable of the series. A Gabby Gabby doll, who purports to date from the '50s, just like Woody - uhh, what?! - has never been loved because her voicebox never worked, and so her evil plan is to get Woody drunk at a bar, seduce him and allow him to wake up in a bathtub full of ice. Well, actually, she just straight up tells Woody that he is about to get organ trafficked, but after hearing her half-hearted spiel, Woody just relents and allows her to take his voicebox, and later wakes up having his back stitched up by a ventriloquist dummy. It was so dark in a way that hasn't fit the Toy Story tone since the very first movie, and struck me as kind of disturbing. Then it is never touched on again. Nothing about how they never needed their voicebox to be loved by a kid or anything. Woody just gets his fucking organs stolen by some mad doll, who then becomes a sympathetic anti-hero for the narrative, and gets a happy ending nothing like that awarded to Stinky Pete or to Lotso. The tone of this movie is up and down like a tart's drawers.

Another questionable addition is that of what I refer to as 'ghetto comedy'. You know, that kind of thing where a black character makes any loud and sarcastic comment, and it is played like it is funny, regardless of whether it actually is. Two stuffed animals from a carnival tag along with Woody for some reason, and serve no purpose other than to yell "Nawwww way, man!" every now and then.

The ending is perhaps one of the most maddening elements of the movie, so *spoiler alert*. When the rest of the toys finally reunite with Woody and Bo at the end of the ordeal, Woody does that weird thing that has become more prevalent as the Toy Storys have gone along, where there are long shots of his furrowed brow as he reflects on something that we cannot interpret. He then murmers a few words to other characters like "Are you sure?" and we just have to wait impatiently to find out exactly what he is referring to. This time, it turns out that Woody has decided that he doesn't need a kid anymore, and is instead going to become the Mickey to Bo's Mallory. That's right, he leaves all of his longtime friends behind in order to enjoy some porcelain pussy. What the actual fuck?!

I'm sure there are one or two other annoyances that have slipped through the cracks of my exhausted bullshit detector, but quite frankly, I feel that I have given this shite movie enough of my precious time for one day and one lifetime. I will never watch this movie again, and I hate to say that it takes twisted glee in slowly picking the stitches that Toy Story 3 had so neatly sewn. Fuck this movie.

Catacombs (2007)

I decided to revisit Catacombs after a good ten years simply because I remembered it being OK and it was going really cheap in the discount DVD shop. It is nowhere near as good as I remembered, probably owing to the fact that I recalled the beginning and the end, and none of the boring shit in between. And boy, is there a LOT of boring shit in between! And even the beginning and end have been bastardised by my damned sense of logic. Let's dive into what could have been a good movie, but isn't: Catacombs.

If you'd ever wondered what a cave full of assholes
looked like...

Victoria (Shannon Sossomon) narrates that she got a mysterious postcard from her sister Caroline (Alecia Moore, AKA Pink) to go and stay with her in Paris, as it would be good for her. The brief intro shows us that Victoria takes a surprisingly wide assortment of medicines, explaining to a couple of obnoxious airport customs officers that she "feels nervous sometimes". The movie makes a point of painting every French person (and that is basically everyone except Victoria and her sis) as a menacing entity who not only hates Americans but is in the very process of concocting a diabolical way to harm whichever American is standing before them. Caroline is the typical carefree punk type that an indie horror would only ever hire Pink to play, but in this sense, means that she is actually a total prick who incessantly drops foreshadowing words of threat that sound the furthest thing from natural dialogue.

The sister's housemates are male French assholes who take joy in shitting people up for no good reason - more foreshadowing. They take Victoria to a party they assure will "change her life", that is hosted in one of the many corners of the Paris catacombs, letting us know highly expositionally - but not in the least bit convincingly - that the Police never catch them because the catacombs are vast and they party at a different spot every time. When we see the vastness of this rave and the sheer noise that it creates, it prompts us to question many of the finer logistical details of this underground party scene: Who the fuck could NOT hear that noise? How can the catacombs safely stand the vibrations and capacity of so much noise, equipment and people? How the fuck do they manage to get full DJ decks, rigging, fully-stocked neon bars, lights and bottomless alcohol, to their venue at all, let alone without attracting any attention? Is the winding line outside the door of what is obviously not a club or any other official establishment not evidence enough for the authorities of where this huge gang of hoodlums may be hosting their latest event? 

OK, Pink's naked shoulders.
Maybe one reason to endure this shit.

Victoria is lured away from the main party by Caroline and her group of Parisian friends, including main party host Jean-Michel (I mean, it was gonna be either that or Pierre, right?!), who take her to a cavern in the catacombs where they skinny dip in a lagoon, but she refuses to join them, and tries to skulk off back to the party. But in between her protests, Jean-Michel relays to her the legend of the devil man living in the catacombs, who was born of satanic ritual and brought up on a diet of raw meat until he was strong enough to be the adult Devil Incarnate. Now he supposedly lurks in the tunnels of the catacombs, so, hey - there's a nice thought for you to take back into those gloomy passageways with ya, Vic!

Caroline catches up with her but they get lost and are soon set about by the Devil man, who apparently kills Caroline, and chases Victoria off. This is where the action ends for a good hour or so. In her copious wanderings in darkness, the only thing that punctuates it much is the appearance of another French dude, Henri, who has a map and a theory as to how to escape. He is soon dispatched though, and Victoria's constant addressing of him as "Henry" - even after he pointedly helped her pronounce his name properly - is surely to blame for half his eventual disdain for her. Anyhow, this bullshit rambles on for way too much longer, and eventually the twist hits. Caroline is not dead, and all of this horror that couldn't possibly have been logically premeditated, was just a "prank" to get Victoria over her mental illness. LOL, they really had her going there!

But Caroline seems outraged that such an elaborate prank could send her mentally fragile sister over the edge and see her inadvertently kill someone in self defense. I mean, Christ, Victoria, lighten up! Just because some masked menace has hunted you down through an underground maze for hours and almost killed you several times, doesn't mean you have to go pick-axe him in the face! By this point, Vic has well and truly had enough of her sister's shit, and kills them all. Then she somehow gets back to the surface (this major point that the entire movie has hinged upon is totally glossed over in the end) and nonchalantly gets in a cab covered in blood, asking to go to the airport. End of movie.

I find myself never saying this, and I mean ever. I mean, people have always told me I should be a teacher because of how I can always find a compliment for everything, but I wasted 90 minutes of my precious life on Catacombs, and I'm kind of pissed off with how little I got in return. I feel like 90 minutes of sitting in gridlock traffic on the motorway may have been a more productive use of my time. But hey, I guess in this case I can churn out a few hundred words on its poor quality.

Guaranteed, she will get to the airport, no questions asked

Shame is, the first act of the movie is well done - very atmospheric and great use of sound editing and cinematography. But then the entire thing comes crashing down in every aspect, and it bobs by, embodying mediocrity. I feel that Catacombs should have been a short film. Take the first twenty minutes, and the final five, glue the ends together, and send it out on the film festival circuits. That could have worked. But a feature film this is not, and as a horror fan, I was left pissed off, and too deprived to call it a night. I had to top it off with something of quality before I could sleep soundly - which I didn't anyhow, by the way. This movie was so disappointing it literally haunted my dreams. Happy viewing.

The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

The Rage: Carrie 2 was probably one of the first sequels I ever saw to a classic horror movie. Carrie, as I have documented before but have yet to formally review, was a conquest of my early adolescence that bordered on obsession, and it remains one of my favourite horrors of all time. My stepsister showed me this sequel when I was about 14, and strangely, I have grown to love it. Years ago, it was a movie I would watch in deepest secrecy, for fear of word getting out that I actually enjoyed such an obviously inferior product; nowadays I adhere to the Dave Gorman school of thought when it comes to the concept of ‘guilty pleasures’ (look this up if you don’t catch my meaning – it’s most amusing and true). I used to love to ride this movie’s ass and say how dreadful it was, but my understanding of film grew at twice the rate of my every other form of maturation, hence my now differing opinion .

How do filmmakers usually achieve a sequel when the lead characters have already been killed off? They resurrect the characters; they repeat the events of the first movie with a new bunch of characters; they continue the story of those who may still be living. Enter Amy Irving, who wisely or not decided to reprise her role of Sue Snell, who is now a middle-aged woman, working as a high school counsellor, somewhat haunted by her involvement in the whole Carrie White debacle some twenty years earlier. That’s fine, but she wasn’t the one with a special power, and it wouldn’t be Carrie if it didn’t have telekinesis. Enter Emily Bergl as Rachel, an unusual looking grunge kid who lives with gnarly trucker foster parents thanks to her own mother’s incarceration at the local asylum. She embodies the ‘90s Nirvana mood – listening to Marilyn Manson and Billie Holliday, passing her evenings working in a photo hut, sneaking her beloved dog Walter into the house at night. She is so befitting the revival of the tormented high school girl.

Boy, didn't think the critics would hate it
this much!

It wouldn’t be a modern high school flick without cliques, which is the engine of this movie’s climax. Rachel is the usual grungy outcast, and her only friend Lisa (Mena Suvari) promptly kills herself in a spectacular effects sequence, having been dumped by a jock she questionably gave her virginity to the night before. The jocks keep a crass system, awarding points to each other according to the girls they sleep with, and Lisa is the game’s latest victim. When the jocks realise they could be in deep shit - having played around with underage girls, prompting one to commit suicide - they decide that ‘damage control’ is the way to go, and they set about making sure Lisa’s only friend won’t squeal on them.

In the midst of all this, one particularly upstanding jock, Jesse (Jason London) decides that what they are doing is wrong (several girls into his scoresheet, of course), and happens to grow close to Rachel. This attracts the cattiness of Tracy, the girl he has blown off, who also becomes determined to take revenge on Rachel. In a mere week, Rachel has gone from invisible virgin outcast with one living friend, to deflowered public enemy #1 with no living friends. High school, eh?

No way the chicks can resist our wet-look
hair gel and sweater vests, man!

Was there a part of you that ever felt like Chris and Billy got off easy in that spinning firey blaze of a car, or that Norma’s assumed unconscious death by smoke inhalation could have been more brutal? Fear not, friends, for this is a late ‘90s movie, and more blood must be spilled than from that suspended metal bucket. That means exploding eyeballs sharded with glass, and testicles ripped off with harpoons, and even a fatal stabbing by CD (guess the format knew it was doomed, wanted to take a bitch out with it!) The finale of the film is a thoroughly enjo

yable flaming bloodbath, and doesn’t it always suck that little bit more when the location being torched is a multi-million dollar mansion of a house, rather than a crappy old school gym?

So what’s the catch? What makes this Carrie 2? The big revelation is that after Carrie’s Daddy Ralph ran away (this is much more detailed in the novella than the 1976 film), one of the hussies he gave a damn-good Bible lesson to was Rachel’s mom, impregnating her with a telekinetic spawn ready to wreak havoc on her high school in later years. That Ralph! 

Ohhh no ya don't! If we have to endure Jason
London's horrible delivery, you do too!

This movie is by no means perfect, and there are still some parts that make me chuckle. Jason London’s delivery, having arrived at the finale party late and found nothing short of a mass teenage grave in flames, runs to Rachel saying, ‘They’re all dead – we gotta get outta here, let’s go’. As if he were a secretary announcing the name of the next patient the doctor was ready to see; totally casual. The asylum is staffed by the most incompetent nurses ever, who fail to notice a patient escaping, but grab another patient who was right next to the door at the same time and drag them off in a backwards-run. I mean, no need to soothe a mental patient dude, just grab them from behind unannounced and literally run with them. No biggy. It’s the small things that make the movie unintentionally funny, and the big things that make it unintentionally good.

Me, pretending to be outraged by this movie

For a number of years – ever since I grew to not hate myself for enjoying this film – I have been firm in my opinion that this would be a good movie, were it not the sequel to Carrie. If this could have just been The Rage, without any links to Brian DePalma’s movie or even Stephen King’s book, and been your average teen angst horror, it would have been great. But by adding that little subtitle, and insisting on trying to milk the bosom of a twenty-five year old movie, it throws away any such credibility.

Artistically, the movie is fairly sound. Some fun is had with black-and-white visuals, and distorted angles and frame speed, while the aforementioned suicide sequence still blows my mind to this day, and I wish the DVD had some kind of documentary that would explain their technique. Because I’m still not quite sure how they did it, and that is the kind of movie I admire. The music is a major strength, with a beautiful haunting theme melody that is performed alternately on piano, keyboard and electric guitar. It is grimy, atmospheric and so well suited. It is perhaps the best thing about this film. The script is nothing special, but it is surprisingly well acted – particularly by the younger members of the cast – and looking back, it fits very nicely into the young late ‘90s horror landscape. It’s very much worth an hour and forty of your time. Just try to forget the whole ‘it’s the sequel to Carrie’ thing.

Pretty Baby (1978)

I confess that I first sought out Louis Malle's Pretty Baby merely because of the torrent of ongoing online controversy that encircled it some forty years after its making. At that point, I was a 19-year-old college student, and of the whole cast and crew, was only familiar with Susan Sarandon (whose career I devised my entire second year film studies project on). Nowadays, I know much about many of the people involved, and most recently, began to read Brooke Shields' autobiography There Was a Little Girl, which details the infamous relationship she had with her mother Teri. I sometimes wonder at how society seems to have gone backwards in so many of its ideas and tolerances, and how the more time goes by, the more incredible it seems that a movie like Pretty Baby was ever made; it certainly wouldn't be nowadays, perhaps in the same way as Lolita, which director Stanley Kubrick later lamented that he could not take to the full extent of his source material, because of 1960s Hollywood censors.

Pretty Baby is a period piece, about a prostitute named Hattie (Sarandon) and her pre-adolescent daughter Violet (Shields), who live in a New Orleans brothel in the early 20th century, just before and during and after the legal clamp-down on the sex industry. Much to the uproar of the small-minded back in the '70s - and to this day - the visual narrative includes a couple of very brief shots of young Brooke Shields, who was only 11 or so when she filmed, naked. But let us start this debate by going back to the definition of pornography, which is material created with the intent of titillating or arousing the viewer. Now, if you are of broad mind, you will accept that a photograph or video of a person naked - whatever their age - does not fit this definition, as nudity is not inherently sexual; an idea modern society is losing grip of. I would argue that the next step in this logic is that a movie tells a story through a combination of narrative media: visuals, sound, etc. As I have mentioned in previous reviews, we as an audience need to see and hear and feel the full extent of our characters' lives if we are going to feel for them. If we had not seen in gruesome detail the cruelties of Joffrey Baratheon, would we have as much reason to hate him?

The movie opens with the gutteral groans of a woman, and a fade in of the bemused and intrigued Violet's face. We all instantly ask the same question: is she witnessing pain or ecstasy? The questions that these speechless opening moments force us to ask ourselves carry on throughout the movie. As it happens, Violet is watching her mother Hattie give birth to another john's illegitimate baby. But, I concede, whether Violet had been bearing witness to childbirth or paid fornication, the experience would have been just as relevant to her life, and to our experience as an audience.

Violet and Hattie live in the glamorous brothel of Madame Nell (Frances Faye), a wide, darkwood classical house with moody burgundy interiors and all the sophistication of the many palaces the elder March daughters visited in Little Women. Here, men of position go there to fulfill their fantasies, and one day, the time has come for young Violet, whose age is never explicitly revealed, to be deflowered by a paying customer. The girl sweet-talks the winning bidder in the naive, scripted way only an eleven-year-old who has been instructed what to say could - much to his disdain.

In between all this action, a photographer has arrived at Madame Nell's, seeking models for his intimate portraits of Louisiana prostitution. He is Bellocq (Keith Carradine), a stern but sensitive being whose heart breaks over the auctioning of Violet's virginity. Among his work with the other women, the girl becomes enamoured with him - again, as only eleven-year-olds do - and he with her, though in a far more paternal and protective fashion. When the fuzz are closing down all the brothels, Hattie moves out with the john  who impregnated her and their illegitimate son, leaving Violet behind. Bellocq marries her in an attempt to save her from a life of imminent poverty and abuse.

Pretty Baby is a long, brooding and sensuous movie, and anyone who pays attention to it can see it for what it is. The odd naked shot is a natural extension of the situation, and as Roger Ebert so gracefully put it, "it's an evocation of a time and a place, and a sad chapter of Americana". The young Brooke Shields shows immense capability that her later career didn't seem to present opportunities to demonstrate, while Carradine conjures the same sorrowful, fair-haired onlooking lover that Peter Firth did in the same year in Roman Polanski's version of Tess.

I love Pretty Baby. It is a rare sort of movie that gives me the low, underlying stirrings of sympathy and yearning that real life relationships give me. Not the kind that make you shout at the screen about what the characters should do, but the kind that moves you, as if your close friend were living this same existence, and an external feeling of remorse and sorrow, yet lack of control over the chaos.

Killer Barbys (1996)

This was a cheap indulgence of a movie in several ways. It cost me two quid, and it looks like they paid the graphic designer of the cover art about the same wage, so the poor little Quasimodo of a DVD was waiting for someone like me to come pick it up, like Toy Story but with home media: they have hopes and dreams, and the forgotten clones of celluloid B look at the moon through the window of the DVD store each night and dream of a horror freak who will love them as they are. Killer Barbys (or Vampire Killer Barbys according to the cover) was that little outcast, and I was the horror freak.

I took a chance, took a ch-ck-ch-chance chance on it because it had Jess Franco's name on it. I've reviewed several Francos, both for UKHS and my own blogs, and his iconic status in European horror makes any little fantasy of his worth my time. Bloody Moon was highly amusing '80s kitch, while Female Vampire was far more typical of Franco's love for gothic naked vampiresses and had an X-Rated cut available. Killer Barbys fits somewhere in between, following the ordeal of mid-'90s punk band The Killer Barbies (a real band in a sort of semi-autobiographical Jagger-type movie portrayal), whose van breaks down in the misty woods on their way to a gig. The three guys and two gals spend most of their time fucking and smoking joints (my kind of people), and do the classic split thing when a creepy old sage in a nice suit invites them to take refuge at the castle of Countess von Fledermaus nearby. The horniest couple stay behind to alleviate some of their horniness, while the others head up to the castle.

Vintage Franco

The old guy, we know, is the lover/secretary of the Countess, who at first is a sinewy corpse gasping on silk bedsheets, starved of the young blood that sustains her vitality. One or two of the band get picked off and used to rejuvenate the Countess enough to show herself to her guests, one of whom she seduces very swiftly over dinner and fucks to death. This, naturally, involves a lengthy sequence of the Countess writhing on the naked body of her doomed lover, covered in his blood.

The movie is thrown off terribly by the presence of an unhumorously comic trio, a freak and two dwarfs he keeps as 'children', who don't kill the horny couple in the woods as we so obviously expect them to, but wank over the sight of them boning, and swap all the punk Barbie dolls decorating the band van with animal skeletons. They are a bad joke to the end, and actively detract from the steam of the movie's engine, in a fashion darkly reminiscent of my beloved bumbling cops in Craven's Last House on the Left.

As a Franco, the movie operates on about a quarter of the production budget that US movies would, and it shows from beginning to end. Highlights include poor visual angles as we watch the Countess 'stab' her lover's 'body' and totally not the mattress right next to him; and the obvious mannequin being thrown out of the window in lieu of a stunt double is movie gold (see The Sinful Dwarf). Franco's style is firmly burrowed in the early '80s, and refuses to update, except for funky '90s clothing. The girls spend the majority of the movie in a t-shirt and panties at the most and just silver go-go boots at the least. The Countess is a fucking stunning 'older' woman who we get to see writhe around naked. A Francophile will be in their fucking element with Killer Barbys.

The music is another strength: although the title song by The Killer Barbies is overused, the early-'90s grunge-punk music is invigorating, and ironic enough to contrast the screen action to good effect. So far, all the Franco movies I've seen have been very distinct, despite Jess's reputation for a couple of favourite subgenre themes. Killer Barbys is a fun, poorly dubbed and unique viewing experience that is 90 minutes well spent, and a pretty cool introduction to the real life Killer Barbies discography.

The Exorcist (1973)

If you tot up box office pull, critical reaction, social and cultural impact, controversy level and professional accolades, can you think of a more successful horror movie than William Friedkin's The Exorcist? It would be seriously difficult for anyone to deny it. I say this, with the words of asshole teenagers ringing in my ears... It's crap, it's boring, it's stupid and the deal breaker: It's not scary! Some young idiots seem intent on denouncing anything older than they are, where I have always reveled in vintage styles. To them, if there is not a body count of at least five, it's not scary. To them, if no one is sexually assaulted by some evil being, it's not scary. To them, if there is no blood and guts flying around at a persistent rate, it's not scary. Well, if we can replace 'guts' with 'vomit', I think we have just solved at least one of these issues.

As a kid, how I yearned for this movie! In my adolescence, my love for horror was blossoming, and I always tuned into those countdown shows of '100 Greatest Scary Moments' and the like. I read every page on the internet I could find about The Exorcist when I saw it ranked at number 3 on the list, and looked at every picture, and listened to every audio excerpt. Back then, the internet (and my knowledge of how to use it to its fullest potential) was in its infancy compared to today, and so if I was gonna see this thing, I'd have to suck it up and ask my folks. Well, Mum immediately said no (duh!), and Pop was also unconvinced, although generally far more on my side. He just didn't want to get shit from my mum for saying yes! Well then, my 13 year old self said, I'll just read the book instead. I mean, they don't put age certificates on books, so who's going to stop me?! (Note: this technique, first devised and exercised in the case of Carrie, was a useful crutch during this time).

Pretending to Mum that I won't go out of
my way to watch this movie anyway.

And then, everything changed. In the shite little town that my mum had moved us to for high school, there weren't many shops, and they were mostly of little interest to teenagers. But a new one came along one day: a second hand video shop. No DVDs, just cassettes. The store's very basic policy was 5 Videos for £4, or £1 each. Simples. After scoping the place once or twice, and noticing that they just bagged videos by the bundle, and didn't bother to sort through them first, I tried my luck one day. The Exorcist, Hellraiser and Gothika, sandwiched between The Little Rascals and Toy Story. Bish bash bosh, off I headed home with my very own copy of The Exorcist! What a fucking badass I was! As if I just got away with that!

Now I knew, for the most part, what to expect due to my collective fragmentary research. I knew that what I had invested a whole 80p in was a piece of history - that was what I loved about it. My friendship group was only as hardcore as The Ring, and had always denounced my love of David Bowie as 'fancying an old man'. But my parents brought me up well, on Fairport Convention and Janis Joplin and Kate Bush. The favourite movies they liked to share with me were The Hunger, The Company of Wolves, and Tess. My Pop was 40 when I was born, and so being a young 'un and direct descendant from an original '60s flower child and member of Alex Sanders' coven, I had some seriously special and vintage influences headed my way. He saw The Stones, Pink Floyd, The Who, all in grassroots concerts where landlords would cut the power after midnight, and the bands would carry on thrashing unplugged for hours into the morning. My parents are two fucking cool people, and although Mum was a little on the overprotective side, they showed me how to appreciate quality art, and to see past age.

My day to day operation relies fairly heavily on the fantasy that it is 1976. Or -3, or -4. Basically throw me anywhere between 1965 and 1978 and I ain't coming home. This period has always had a dazzling appeal to me, and all the cool stories my folks have told me about these times shaped my interests and tastes as an adult. There is not a day goes by that I do not wear high-waisted flares, platform shoes and my hair in flicks. I'm one of those (I bet many of you will relate) who feels they were born too late. When I watch old movies, and see cute chicks like Linda Blair or

Ultimate staring contest

Sandra Cassell with their bell-bottomed jeans and clingy tops on braless tits, I just feel like I belong there, not here and now. And so old movies are a means of fantasy, they're like my porn (which the '70s produced wonderfully, too! Man, remind me to review Deep Throat on here sometime!)

But I lengthily digress... The Exorcist! We start in Iraq (God, can you imagine?!), where Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) seems to have retired to some anthropological position, and is alerted to some interesting demon relic they have found. Merrin seems to recognise it, and takes a journey to another dig site, where he stands face to face with a lifesize statue of the demon Pazuzu. Fade to Georgetown, Washington, where actress Chris MacNeill (the wonderful Ellen Burstyn) is living with her daughter Regan (our gal Linda Blair) whilst filming a movie on location. They are such a cute couple, who clearly adore each other, and Linda's signature cuteness is at maximum impact. Despite Regan's absent father causing stress to them both, they seem to have an awesome life. Their house is gigantic, and they host cool parties where people drink at their bar and priests play their grand piano for singsongs, all while multiple cigarettes create a fog. I mean, if that's not living the '70s dream, I don't know what is!

Livin' the dream, baby!

But strange occurrences are off to a flying start, first around the house with weird noises, and then with Regan. Now Chris is a very modern '70s woman, who doesn't care to carry a husband who can't deal with her career, and doesn't believe in God. She lives a fun, liberal, atheist life, as does Regan. So when things first kick off, she takes her to doctors, seeking a psychological explanation for her daughter's violent outbursts. Chris soon reaches breaking point, at which she knows nothing anymore, and will turn in any direction open to her. So when clinical doctors and psychologists professionally suggest that this steadfast atheist turn to priests for an exorcism, she seeks the help of Damien Karras (Jason Miller). Karras is a deep, complex character, who also stirs our sympathy. He is a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist from a destitute Italian family, whose poor aged mother is put into a cruel state hospital because he cannot afford a private hospital for her, where she later dies. He is racked with guilt and finds himself falling apart from his faith. When Chris turns to him for an exorcism, he follows her pattern of action: first he examines the girl as a psychiatrist, and finding himself flummoxed, eventually agrees to take the matter to the church's Boys Upstairs, so to speak.

When Ebert reviewed The Shining, he drew attention to one of the film's strengths, in the way it creates mystery by ensuring that none of its characters are reliable sources, preventing anybody - including us as an audience - from understanding the situation with clarity. I think that Friedkin expertly handled this same method, while thankfully recruiting William Peter Blatty, the novel's author, to adapt his own work for the screen. The doctors suggest exorcism as a last resort, when they can present no medical explanation, saying that it could produce results thanks to the power of suggestion. The 'demon' seems to taunt Karras very personally, telling information it shouldn't know. But we know Damien is feeling unstable and desolate since his mother's death. Chris is hysterical a lot of the time, and the famous head spin, as written in the novel, dictates that in the delirium of the scene, before fainting, Chris "thought she saw" Regan's head turn all the way around. It is never certain. None of the characters know whether Regan is crazy or possessed, and neither do we. Do the characters believe in the devil and all that sort of stuff? Do we?

Are you ready for a mind-fuck? Then I'll begin.

Friedkin's direction of The Exorcist is so bold and self-assured. The screen is his playpen, and he likes to play Follow the Leader, pulling the audience along in one direction and then cranking the lever to a trapdoor we hadn't noticed we were standing on. Consider, for example, Karras's silent dream sequence, in which he tries to chase his mother through the street, cut with close-ups of a pendant falling. Each time we cut back to the necklace falling, it is like a warning of the inevitable, that what falls must land, like a countdown to a shock cut, with Regan screaming wildly. He does the impossible of making what is essentially an exploitation visual an artistic endeavour, and benefits greatly from Blatty's screen adaptation of his own novel. What many have deemed so shocking about The Exorcist for generations is not its real spirit - it is no I Spit on Your Grave, although the source material could definitely have been deviated as such under the wrong pen - but vital ingredients to the best telling of this narrative.

As an adult, I suddenly saw the film from an entirely different perspective - that of the mother, Chris. When I reread the novel and considered it, it occurred to me that the 'main character' of the story is either Chris or Karras - not the titular Exorcist Merrin, or the girl he exorcises. Their individual threads of mental and psychic torture are the real plot, and when I watched the movie again as a parent, a whole new dimension of sympathy for Chris had opened up. My daughter is fast approaching Regan's sort of age, and she too is my only child, so the idea of such a horrific ordeal unfolding for my own baby, and my having absolutely no control over it, gave me more terror than any pea soup vomit or crucifix masturbation ever did.

The same can be said for Karras, whose mental state - and its consequent attribution to his death - is more detailed towards the end in the book, and by the finale of the story, we know that the exorcism has been going on for around four or five days, and in that time, he has caught perhaps half an hour's sleep once or twice. He has not eaten, is still reeling with guilt and grief over his mother's hospitalisation and death, and has spent the better part of a week being psychologically tormented by an apparent all-knowing demon. Having a depth of understanding into Karras's condition when he confronts Regan for the final time is crucial to knowing how it will, and must, end. And ultimately, Karras is one of those poetic tortured souls whose only release is surely death, making his fatality somehow not as tragic as it may first seem.

The Exorcist remains one of the most notorious horror films of all time, as well as one of the most mainstream and creatively successful - an odd combination for the genre. But what many a modern audience seems to have little appreciation for is the telling of a horror story with no guts and gore, no murder or bogeyman. Even with its infamous special effects by Grandfather of Makeup Dick Smith, the movie is considered 'boring' these days because of the long stretches of deep dialogue and character building that punctuate the horror scenes. In this sense, it is similar to Jaws - another movie I always loved but grew a deep appreciation for on many new levels as I matured. I daresay the ship has sailed for movies of this calibre to be made again. We are too politically correct, and big studios are simply not willing to give a picture like The Exorcist the time and budget they granted it back in the day. As with many things that took place during that evolutionary era, all the elements happened to be aligned that would make it happen, and sadly, those elements are now at best out of whack, and at worst, non-existent.

Last House on the Left (2009)

Last House on the Left, by Wes Craven, is my favourite horror movie of all time, and any reader of my stuff knows that well. We are still in the midst of a decade-long trend of remaking classic horror movies, and in the grand scheme of things, I am sort of surprised right now that Last House got one before Carrie, Poltergeist or even The Exorcist (these were all terrible and should not have been attempted), due to its underground nature and mixed reception in modern day. But the centuries-old Virgin Spring story that Last House, among several other movies, is based upon still holds water, perhaps now more than ever. When I considered it in contrast to Denis Iliadis' 2009 remake, the original Last House was not what one would imagine when thinking of a horror movie: plenty of comic relief and dark humour, almost no on-screen gore and ungratuitous narrative. The new one takes on a far more classical 'horror' feel from the start, with dark misty visuals, more menacing characters and an obviously ominous set up.

The original Last House went like this: Mari, the daughter of a doctor, lives in the woods of Connecticut, and is celebrating her 17th birthday by heading into the city with her streetwise friend Phyllis, who Mari's mother dislikes and distrusts. On their way to a concert, they cross paths with a gang of escaped convicts while in pursuit of ganja, and get kidnapped, sexually abused and ultimately murdered in the woods near Mari's home. When the gang's car won't start, they seek shelter at the nearest house - and its occupants soon discover what has happened to their daughter, and seek to right some wrongs. This action was punctuated with upbeat folk music and a duo of dumb cops trying to stop the bad guys.

The remake opens with a play on the original loveable cops with two detestable assholes, who are escorting dangerous convict Krug to his new prison. His accessories Francis (Aaron Paul), girlfriend Sadie and son Justin run the cop car off the road and spring Krug. Then we meet the Collingwoods: teenage daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) is a determined competitive swimmer, under much encouragement from her mother, while Doc Collingwood (Tony Goldwyn) is a hands-on ER doctor/surgeon. They lost their son a year previously - Mari treasures a gold pendant that he had engraved for her, and Momma Collingwood frets over her one remaining child with appropriate neurosis.

They come to stay at their summer house in the woods, and Mari looks up old friend Paige, and hooks up with her at her job in a convenience store. The girls chat behind the counter and Mari's newfound aversion to marijuana is made evident. A shady young hoodlum overhears their conversation, and he invites them back to his motel room to buy some green. The girls get friendly with the boy, Justin, and end up partying awhile in the room, when Krug, Sadie and Francis come home, and decide that the girls' inate involvement in their crime spree means that they cannot leave.

This time around, Mari is the smart one, and in the course of her kidnapping, pulls off several intuitive tricks in escape attempts. Her ultimate survival just happens to hinge on her immense swimming ability - but let's face it, they wouldn't have bothered giving us this insight into her personal life if it weren't going to pay off later. This time around, Doc Collingwood's profession serves more purpose than to justify the family's large house. When his near-dead daughter ends up on the doorstep, he uses all his top ER tricks to save her life, all while touchingly talking to her like a loving father.

The gang are very modern, in that the girlfriend gets her tits out a lot, the sidekick is a small white thug, and the leader is absolutely unoriginal. In both looks and character, this Krug is unremarkable and although his team dynamic is largely unexplored, he is a psychological manipulator and a physical abuser. His control of his son is not reliant on heroin, but on emotion, and in amongst his physical assault of the girls, he rubs salt into the wounds with his psychological abuse. His written character is pretty good, but on screen it is not too memorable. David Hess as Krug is one of the most charismatic movie characters ever, and it's a tough act to follow.

The abuse that the girls suffer in the woods is far more in-your-face than in it was in the original, to a certain effect. The rape of Mari certainly turned my stomach, but I maintain that in a good narrative, such cruelties are necessary for us as an audience to feel the way the author intends us to about certain characters - consider Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones to get my point. But a comparison can be drawn here: the 1972 version made my heart ache with its depiction of sexual assault, where the 2009 version made me feel sick. This evidences the primary difference between the two Last Houses: 1972 was a sorrowfully poetic movie, and the 2009 movie was a horror exploitation.