Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) - Season One Review

A plucky heroine standing against supernatural forces is nothing new to television – Joss Whedon spent seven seasons exploring that with Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and now Netflix throws its hat in the ring with their adaptation of the comic book series that takes the sweet natured character of Sabrina, first introduced in Archie Comics back in 1962, into a decidedly darker and more horrific direction. Most of us are familiar with the character of Sabrina from the 90s television show Sabrina the Teenage Witch, starring Melissa Joan Hart, but talking cats and goofy shenanigans are not to be found in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Instead, we have heaping helpings of gothic horror, dread and gore, where this plucky heroine must decide what path she will take — the dark path of the witch or the one of the mortal world. Of course, this series isn’t all blood, guts and demonology — as much as I'd like that — the show also deals heavily with Sabrina’s desire to keep her mortal friends, and that is where the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina stumbles the most as it tries to balance high school drama with the darker aspects of horror.

Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) is half-witch/half-mortal, raised by her two aunts, Zelda (Miranda Otto) and Hilda (Lucy Davis) Spellman, and upon her sixteenth birthday, she is to attend her “Dark Baptism,” a ceremony that involves Sabrina signing her name into the Dark Lord’s book, and this is something Sabrina is hesitant to do. And why is that, you ask? Well it just so happens that Sabrina is in love with a mortal boy named Harvey Kinkle (Ross Lynch), and taking the dark path would mean abandoning him as well as her two best girlfriends Rosalind (Jaz Sinclair) and Suzie (Lachlan Watson). This is meant to be a tough decision, but given that we know little of Sabrina as a character, we can’t completely understand her dilemma, for the witches in this universe are evil, and I mean really, really evil – we’re talking murdering, cannibalistic servants of Lucifer who who utter "Praise Satan" at every opportunity – so Sabrina having any qualms about which path to take left me questioning her moral compass. Did her aunts somehow shelter her from the darker aspects of their world?  Did she think their extolling of "Praise Satan" was just some quaint old world affectation? The witches here are not some form of Wicca practitioners, who give offerings up to pagan gods, they have literally signed over their souls to the actual Devil.

 

There isn’t a lot of grey area if you are worshipping this dude.

This is the hardest aspect of the show to swallow; that the supposed nice girl Sabrina would be a party to any of this, and even as she makes a “Deal with the Devil” – forgoing the signing of the Dark Book but agreeing to attend classes at the Academy of the Unseen Arts – we have to question just how blindly naive this girl really is. Throughout the ten episode season we find Sabrina running to her aunts or fellow witches time and time again for advice – usually because of something stupid she has done — but they have all promised to serve Satan body and soul, so I can’t see their advice being all that unbiased. They are enthralled to the Father of Lies, how can she trust any of them, for Pete's sake! She even goes to a trio of seriously dangerous witches for help with school bullying.

 

Has she never seen the movie The Craft?

Kiernan Shipka does admirable work with the material given her – I don’t fault her for the complete lack of chemistry between Sabrina and Harvey – and the show is a visual feast of Gothic imagery that will have any fans of the genre salivating at almost every shot; the supporting cast as a whole brings a measure of substance to the show, even if their backstories are a little thin and unexplored – I do love Sabrina’s cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo) who is under house arrest for trying to blow up the Vatican – and the make-up and special effects are all pretty top notch, I just wish the showrunners had spent a little more time on figuring out how the “witch world” actually works. We are told that witches are not supposed to interfere with the mortal world, but they seem to hold down jobs and interact with them all the time, so what level of interaction is allowed?  Sabrina's dad married a mortal, and though frowned upon, it was allowed.

 

This show should have provided CliffNotes.

Then there is the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry…sorry, I mean the Academy of the Unseen Arts, where Sabrina is to attend classes while apparently also going to her regular high school, and this had me wondering just how she can pull this off. Did the school’s headmaster Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle) lend her Hermione's Time-Turner?

 

Welcome to Bargain Basement Hogwarts.

The show doesn’t spend much time with exactly how the Academy of the Unseen Arts functions, we don’t in fact spend all that much time there at all – we see Sabrina joins the school choir and almost gets hazed to death, and that's about it – but as far as I can tell, the school only has two teachers: Father Blackwood and his wife who runs the choir. So not so much an evil school as it is a poorly manned community college, and this lacking could have easily been rectified if they’d spent more time on the witch world and less on the cliché high school drama that we are forced to wallow through at Sabrina’s regular school. Did we actually need another teen drama that deals with bullying, sexual identity, censorship and sexism? Worse is that Bronson Pinchot is wasted as the school's boorish principal, and is pretty much only trotted out when the writers remember he is there at all. And I’m not saying this show shouldn’t tackle such topics, science fiction and fantasy have always been able to take interesting spins on important social matters, but in this case, they do it in such a leaden and hackneyed fashion that it’s almost laughable.

 

“Let’s all go to the Malt Shop to discuss today’s lesson.”

On a more serious note, have you heard of the Salem Witch trials? I’m sure you have, but if not let’s just say it wasn’t a particularly shining moment in the history of America, as fourteen women and five men were found guilty of witchcraft and were executed — the key fact here being that they weren’t actually witches. Shocking, I know. Yet in this series, it clearly implies that the Salem Witches were in fact real witches, and that is all kinds of poor taste if you ask me, especially when this show blatantly depicts witches as being evil Satan worshipping villains. So are we now to believe that the citizens of Salem killed those people in self-defense? Working real life tragic events into your fiction is tricky business, and the people behind the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are about as subtle and tactful as a bull in a china shop.

 

Subtlety thy name is Netflix.

This review may seem quite harsh, and certain aspects of the show really deserve a good flogging, but the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina does have some good qualities – mostly in the casting and art direction – and if the showrunners could have pulled their collective heads out of their asses long enough come up with a consistent world of witches and mortals, we could have a really fun show on our hands.

Stray Observations:

• Zelda repeatedly murders her sister Hilda in a nod to the comic book House of Secrets, where Caine and Able do the same.
• Sabrina only agrees to attend the Academy of the Unseen Arts so that she can learn summoning and banishment. This is so she can take on the Dark Lord. Seriously, she expects to be able to banish Lucifer himself. Good luck with that.
• Every television set in Glendale seems to play nothing but black and white horror movies.
• Sabrina gets legal counsel from Daniel Webster of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” fame.
• Why would attempting to blow up the Vatican get a witch in trouble? They repeatedly call Christianity the "false church," so wouldn’t this be considered a plus in Satan’s book?
• Sabrina has a “Monkey’s Paw” dilemma that goes as good as can be expected.
• My favourite character is “Madame Satan,” as actress Michelle Gomez eats up every inch of scenery within reach, and she is a pure delight to watch.
• Sabrina is the key to a dark prophecy, because of course she is.

 

Can we please retire supernatural “Chosen Ones” for a while?

Halloween (2018) – Review

The Halloween franchise is easily one of the oddest collections of films; there are currently eleven films in the series, with all kinds of weird continuity — the third installment being an attempt at turning the franchise into some kind of horror anthology — but when that didn’t work, they brought back knife-wielding Michael Myers to terrorize teenagers everywhere. Then, in 2007, Rob Zombie was given the chance to reboot the franchise, but neither it nor its sequel were well-received by fans, and now Blumhouse Productions brings us the final (snicker) installment that ignores every other film except the John Carpenter original.  Being that the Halloween sequels vary in quality, between adequate and utter crap, this is not an intrinsically bad idea – the Godzilla franchise does this kind of thing all the time – but the problem here is that without those forty years of Michael Myers slashing his way across America, we’re just dealing with a sixty-year-old guy who killed five people decades ago. This kind of lets the air out of the tires of the whole thing.

This follow up to the 1978 original finds Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) living in a heavily fortified house deep in the woods, the traumatic events of the “Babysitter Killings” having turned her into a paranoid survivalist, whose crazed plans to ward off the inevitable return of Michael Myers resulted in Child Services taking away her twelve-year-old daughter. The estranged daughter Karen (Judy Greer), now an adult and married to a guy named Ray (Toby Huss), has a teenaged daughter of her own named Allyson (Andi Matichak), who rebels against her mother’s wishes when it comes to hanging out with crazy grandma. You really can’t blame her, as Laurie is as crazy as a shithouse rat, for when she’s not breaking down into a sobbing mess at a restaurant, she’s cosplaying as Sarah Conner.

 

“Come with me if you want to live.”

Now I’m sure that narrowly escaping with your life while your close friends were brutally murdered, is going to leave some emotional scars on a teenage girl, but the Laurie Strode in this film appears to be a woman who must have seen all those sequels – the ones we're supposed to pretend didn’t happen – because if not, she has ruined her life over a guy who killed a few people and has been rotting in a mental institution ever since. Why has she trained every day of her life since that fateful night for his return? Myers hasn’t said one peep to anyone since he was six years old, so there really isn’t any reason to believe that if he managed to escape, he’d give two shits about the one that got away, and the movie wisely ditched the whole “Laurie is Michael’s little sister” plot line, but with that gone we lose any substantial motivation for why he’d want to track her down. In this film, we see him wander from house to house randomly murdering people, and there doesn’t seem to be any pattern or trigger for these kills, so why the fixation on Laurie?

 

Does she owe him money or something?

The film opens with two British true-crime podcasters Aaron (Jefferson Hall) and Dana (Rhian Rees) confronting Michael Myers (Nick Castle) at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, waving the iconic Halloween mask in his fact in the hopes of getting a reaction. The only reason for this scene is to apparently set up how he gets his old mask back, as if that's something any of the films in this franchise every worried about. These soon-to-be-dead podcasters then drop by to bother crazy Laurie in her “Bunker of Doom” thinking she can shed some light on why Myers tried to kill her all those many years ago…wait…what? Wasn’t it made clear that Myers was just stalking and killing random teenagers, and that the only thing special about Laurie was that she survived? The original Halloween II took place the same night as the first film, so Myer’s following her to the hospital could be considered him wanting to tie up loose ends, but to think that after forty years he’s still hung up on her, well that’s kind of pathetic. We get Laurie spouting such drivel as, “Forty years ago, he came to my home to kill. He killed my friends, and now he's back to finish what he started, with me. The one person who's ready to stop him.” How exactly did she come to this conclusion? Has Laurie developed some sort of psychic bond with a mental patient who hasn’t spoken a word in decades? There has to be a better explanation for why Michael Myers has returned to Haddonfield; more than just to finish off Laurie.

 

“I just want you to sign my yearbook.”

In this film’s hour and forty-five minute run-time, we are introduced to many characters, from Michael’s current psychiatrist Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), who is easily the stupidest character to appear in a Halloween movie, to the noble Officer Hawkins (Will Patton), who was the first officer on the scene of the "Babysitter Killings," and was the one who apprehended Myers. This raises an interesting continuity issue, because the original film ended with Laurie and Dr. Loomis looking out the balcony window to find that Michael Myers had disappeared. Are we to assume that Myer’s just got up after being shot, hobbled around to the side of the house, only to be quickly apprehended by Officer Hawkins? With Michael Myers being immediately captured, and not mysteriously vanishing into the night, it completely undercuts the whole "Boogeyman" aspect of Michael Myers. With this new take on things that classic ending would have been altered to something like this…

Laurie: “Was that the Boogeyman?”
Loomis: “As a matter of fact, it was.”
Laurie: “Oh look, they just arrested him.”
Loomis: “Well, I guess he wasn’t the Boogeyman after all.”

 

“You’re not the Boogeyman; you’re just an asshat in a mask.”

This new Halloween offers none of the suspense or scares found in the original, with kills that aren’t even vaguely interesting – bashing heads is his go-to attack in this film – and the characters are so thinly developed that I couldn’t have cared less if they were killed by Myers or not. Even John Carpenter’s haunting music failed to illicit a reaction from me, as it only reminded me of how much of a better film the original was. This sequel/remake/reboot simply recycles classic moments from previous entries and trots out Jamie Lee Curtis to add some nostalgia to the proceedings, but worst of all is that an iconic horror villain is relegated to lumbering around like a trained seal with all the mystery brutally removed. This may not be the worst entry in the franchise, that’s still Halloween: Resurrection, but what we have here is a chapter that just didn’t need to be told.

Final Thoughts:

• Michael’s retrieving of his iconic mask makes him the luckiest serial killer on the planet; there is no way he could have known the podcasters would stop at a particular gas station to fill up.
• When it is discovered that Michael Myers has returned, and several people have already been murdered, the police drive Laurie and her family to her country house. Wouldn’t the police station have been the more obvious choice of destinations?
• Laurie has a hidden basement bunker in her home, one which everyone keeps running in and out of, instead of remaining hidden there.
• A couple of idiot cops radio "officer down," just before they themselves are killed, but no further police ever arrive at the scene.
• Allyson running through woods had me wondering if I’d nodded off and they were now playing Friday the 13th.
• Laurie stalks Michael through her home with a rifle – a terrible choice for close-quarter combat – and she doesn’t even bother to turn on any lights.
• Once again, people shoot Michael and then forget that they still have a gun in their hands, this is so he can get back up and come at them again.

 

You'd think she at least would know what “Double Tap to the Head” was.

The Night Strangler (1973) – Review

One year after the successful airing of the made-for-television movie The Night Stalker, producer Dan Curtis re-teamed up with legendary writer Richard Matheson for an eagerly awaited sequel, an excellent second outing that would result in ABC greenlighting a series based on the supernatural adventures of investigative reporter Carl Kolchak. The sequel, entitled The Night Strangler, would follow much of the same formula of the original movie, but with more of an emphasis on comedy than horror.

The Night Strangler opens much as its predecessor did, with reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) narrating over the murder of a beautiful young woman, but in this outing the killer isn’t a creature of supernatural origins, such as a vampire, but instead that of a man of science, or to put it more accurately, a practitioner in the dark arts of alchemy. In this film, we find Kolchak haunting a Seattle press bar, where he tries to get fellow reporters to believe his story of a vampire in Las Vegas, and he runs into his old boss Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland), who is now the editor of the Seattle Chronicle. Feeling bad for the way things went down in Vegas – Carl having to flee the city to avoid an arrest warrant for staking the suspect – Vincenzo and Kolchak fall quickly into their familiar relationship with Kolchak demanding his wild theories should see print, or “The Truth” as he’d put it, while Vincenzo does his best to avoid having a heart attack during each and every one of their arguments.

 

Like an old married couple on the verge of mutual murder.

As the story unfolds, and the body count rises, Kolchak comes to the quick conclusion that he’s onto another big story, especially after the lonely archivist for the Seattle Chronicle Titus Berry (Wally Cox) points out that twenty-one years ago there was a string of very similar murders; six women, over a period of eighteen days, were found with their necks broken – bones crushed as if by supernatural strength – and blood removed through a small puncture at the base of their skulls. Most startling of all, the coroners reported that the victims all had traces of rotting flesh on their necks. Further research reveals that the cycle of murders dates back more than a century, and that if the killer isn’t found and stopped before he gets his sixth victim, he will disappear for another twenty-one years.

 

“I’d call Fred and Daphne for help, but I’m allergic to dogs.”

This sequel does little to break new ground – “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” being a solid studio motto – and the overall success of this outing is due mostly to Richard Matheson’s’ immensely fun script. Did you find Kolchak driving his boss into near apoplectic rages fun? Well you’re in luck, this film easily doubles the angry banter from the previous entry, and to add more fuel to the fire, Kolchak has several heated arguments with Seattle police Capt. Schubert (Scott Brady), who after just one encounter with our favourite reporter would like to see Kolchak locked up behind bars forever. So once again, we find Kolchak butting heads with authority, and his wild theories and so-called facts stirring up trouble, but where The Night Stalker focused quite a bit of it's running time on the cynicism of the times, The Night Strangler is more about witty banter than social commentary. In fact, this change in tone is the only thing that prevents the sequel from seeming like a complete rehash of the first film, because structurally they are very much alike.

• In both films the killer stalks beautiful women, only in this film we’ve traded up from casino workers to exotic dancers.
• The authorities try and stop Kolchak’s reporting because it could hurt tourism if it were known that a monster was running around committing murder.
• Kolchak once again witnesses police officers being tossed around by the supernaturally strong killer.
• A female friend of one of the victims teams up with Kolchak to find the killer, this time its belly dancer Louise Harper (Jo Ann Pflug) instead of his prostitute girlfriend from The Night Stalker.
• Kolchak enters the villains lair without any kind of back-up, though at least in The Night Stalker he brought a cross and stake, this time out he only has a crappy camera.
• With the villain exposed and dispatched, Kolchak once again finds defeat snatched from the jaws of victory as his article is quashed and he is fired…again.

 

After Vegas you’d think he’d have seen it coming.

Producer Dan Curtis decided not to share in the fun with the sequel, and so took his spot in the director’s chair this time out, and he did a more than serviceable job with Matheson's script, channeling Ben Hecht’s The Front Page for the scenes of rapid-fire dialogue – Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland both excelling at this – and Curtis’s love for the works of legendary Italian director Mario Bava is quite apparent as the cinematography is very reminiscent of Bava’s Bay of Blood; even the killer’s darkly-garbed visage looks like it stepped right out of the film Blood and Black Lace. The key plot element of an immortal killer – not a supernatural being, but a man with an elixir of life – wasn’t as easy a sell to the networks as a vampire was, but Matheson's inspired idea to use the underground city that lies below Seattle’s Pioneer Square made the film’s rousing last act visually and emotionally riveting.

Historic Note: The Seattle Underground is a network of underground passageways and basements that were created when the city officials decided to elevate that portion of the town, which had been decimated in a fire, instead of just tearing it down. Though these basements and corridors still exist today, they are in no way as massive as they’re depicted in The Night Strangler, and certainly not as well lit.

The villain of this piece is kept hidden for the bulk of the film's 90 minute running time, simply a dark clad figure lurking in the shadows, but when Kolchak eventually deduces that the killer is a 144 year-old Civil War doctor named Dr. Richard Malcolm (Richard Anderson), and confronts him in his underground lair – the beautifully redressed Bradbury Building – we find a rather loquacious, if not quite demented character. Where the vampire in The Night Stalker was only allowed to hiss and growl, the villain of The Night Strangler becomes quite verbose, as he extols his origins to Kolchak. Of course, he does plan on killing our hero once he finishes, but I guess the urge to tell anyone of your remarkable discovery is just too compelling. Richard Anderson gives a delightful performance as a mad scientist who may have lived a tad too long, and at one point he interrupts Kolchak to ask his dead family for their opinion.

 

A mummified dinner party is never a good sign of sanity.

As far as sequels go, The Night Strangler is certainly above average; the cast all give great performances – with some fantastic cameos, including John Carradine as the publisher of the Seattle Chronicle, Al Lewis as a homeless man who falls victim to the strangler, and Margaret Hamilton as an occult expert – and the cinematography is top notch. As movie-of-the-week material goes, it stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries; thus, it is no surprise that ABC would decide to spin it off into a full series. Sadly, a falling-out between Dan Curtis and Darren McGavin would result in neither Curtis nor Richard Matheson being a part of the series. The character of Carl Kolchak will forever be one of the all-time greatest television creations, and if you’ve managed to somehow go through life without seeing either The Night Stalker or The Night Strangler, you need to rectify this as soon as possible.

Trivia Note: Both Darren McGavin and Richard Anderson played Steve Austin’s boss in The Six Million Dollar Man.

The Night Stalker (1972) – Review

In 1972, ABC aired a “Movie of the Week” about a newspaper reporter who could best be described now as the Woodward and Bernstein of the supernatural set, and in doing so, ABC gave birth to one of fiction's most memorable characters: Carl Kolchak in The Night Stalker.  The movie was based on an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice called “The Kolchak Papers” – which in manuscript form bounced around Hollywood for a time – but when legendary writer Richard Matheson was put on the job as screenwriter, and Dan “Dark Shadows” Curtis was brought on to produce, the result was a “perfect storm” of talent that was topped off with the casting of Darren McGavin as investigative journalist Carl Kolchak. This made-for-TV movie was not only an amazing mash-up, but it also garnered the highest ratings of any TV movie at that time. Now, almost five decades have passed since it’s original airing, and The Night Stalker is still as fresh and pertinent as it was back in the 70s; so let us journey back and re-visit a seminal moment in television history.

The movie opens with a weary Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) listening to a replay of his dictated notes about a series of murders that took place in Las Vegas, a story he covered but which was subsequently quashed by the authorities. This narrative device would carry on throughout this movie and would become the signature element of the sequel and the series it spawned. The character of Kolchak is a perfect avatar for an audience that is entering the world of the supernatural for the first time; he is a world weary cynic, having been fired from ten papers across the country due to his unbridled desire for the truth, and he certainly doesn’t believe in ghosts and ghoulies or things that go bump in the night. When Kolchak is first assigned the case of a murdered girl at the Gold Dust Saloon, by his ever beleaguered editor Anthony "Tony" Vincenzo (Simon Oakland), he is not happy about the assignment, referring to it as, “A two-day old, third-rate murder,” but when the body count continues to climb, he becomes very interested, as a serial killer story could be his ticket back to the big leagues of journalism.

 

Carl Kolchak, professional cynic and hunter of the truth.

The Night Stalker came about in a period of time when the public was starting to lose its trust in people of authority; the Vietnam War was dragging endlessly on, and Nixon’s Watergate scandal was just around the corner, thus having a Don Quixote-like reporter pushing at the “windmills” of government would have certainly struck a nerve in audiences of 1972. Much of this movie’s short 75 minute running time deals with Kolchak butting heads with authority, in the form of Sheriff Butcher (Claude Akins), Police Chief Masterson (Charles McGraw) and District Attorney Paine (Kent Smith), who block every attempt Kolchak makes in publishing reports of a man murdering young women and draining them of blood. Now at first, Kolchak is a firm believer that “This nut thinks he's a vampire!” but even the idea of a crazed serial killer is bad for tourism, so his stories are repeatedly suppressed. That the governmental authorities held such power over the press is almost as chilling as the idea of a vampire running around Las Vegas, but even more chilling when you consider the fact that vampires aren’t real and corrupt governments are very real, and far more dangerous.

 

The age old battle of public safety concerns versus economic interests.

What makes Carl Kolchak such a compelling character is that though he comes across as a rather abrasive and jaded cynic, with fortune and glory being a central part of his motives, and as the mystery unravels he is close-minded to the idea of the supernatural. It gets interesting when his girlfriend Gail Foster (Carol Lynley) suggests to Carl that they could be dealing with an actual vampire, and not just a nut, and after some urging he actually does read up on vampire mythology. Then, when he sees for himself the killer tossing police officers around, and shrugging of a hail of gunfire as if it was nothing, he’s not too stubborn to admit that this could be an actual living breathing vampire. Of course, this realization doesn’t help his case with those in authority – they already considered Kolchak a loose cannon that needs to be stifled – but when he points out that almost every cop on the scene had emptied their guns on the killer, they have one of two choices, “Either he was shot, or your entire police department is blind.”

 

“I think we may have winged him…four or five times.”

Let us now take a look at the film’s title character, the "night stalker," terrorizing the young women of Las Vegas. Though the film tries to dance around the mystery of whether this is a nut or an actual vampire, anyone who saw the many television promos previous to the movie’s airing went into a viewing of The Night Stalker knowing full-well that we were dealing with the real thing. Kolchak’s good friend and FBI agent Bernie Jenks (Ralph Meeker) reveals that they have identified the suspect, as to be one Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater), a man who has been the prime suspect in multiple homicides involving massive losses of blood extending back years and across several countries. Skorzeny would have to be in his seventies by this time, and this lends credence to Kolchak’s claims that they are dealing with an actual vampire, as it was no elderly European tossing Las Vegas’s finest around. The type of vampire Barry Atwater portrays in this movie is one that is animalistic in nature, he utters not one word of dialogue, and mostly hisses for the camera, but he is quite terrifying in his ferocity and hunger. His portrayal of Janos Skorzeny is reminiscent of Christopher Lee’s performance in Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and it is quite effective.

 

A quiet but deadly vampire.

The Night Stalker was far from the first vampire movie to take place in a modern urban setting, even Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi was a contemporary retelling of the Bram Stoker novel, but with this film much of the focus wasn’t so much on the supernatural elements of the vampire story, but in how the police and the press tried to handle the situation. We follow Kolchak’s journey from skeptic to true believer as he seeks out informers and witnesses that can all add clues to the true horror and mystery that has thrown a shadow over Las Vegas, and it’s in seeing this wonderfully realized seersucker suit-wearing reporter, doggedly hunting down a vampire, despite the personal and professional risk that it entails, that makes him such a great character and this film so memorable. We should not fail to mention that the film was also admirably directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, a prolific and talented television director, and the fantastic cinematography of Michel Hugo balances elements of modern horror with the classic gothic look.

Stray Thoughts:

• Television censors at the time forced the writers to only allude to the fact that the first victim may have been a lesbian and that Kolchak’s girlfriend was a prostitute.
• The city coroner is played by Larry Linville, who a year later would play Major Frank Burns on M*A*S*H.
• Kolchak seems immune to police protocols as he just wanders in and out of crime scenes and none of the officers ever bat an eye at this.
• This film adds a terrifying original element to the vampire mythos; Kolchak discovers one of Skorzeny's victims bound and alive in his cobwebbed lair, where she was apparently being used to warm the blood he had been stealing from local hospitals.

 

This idea is simply horrifying, but I guess it’s more fun than drinking from a bottle.

If The Night Stalker had been released theatrically – and given fifteen or so extra minutes to make it a proper feature length – it would have most likely met with fantastic box office numbers, but by theatrical or television standards this movie is a gem of the genre, and Darren McGavin’s portrayal of Carl Kolchak, which is simply priceless, would later inspire Chris Carter to create The X-Files. If you haven’t had a chance to see The Night Stalker, or its sequel and subsequent series, you need to do yourself a favor and track it down. To quote Carl Kolchak himself, “Judge for yourself its believability and then try to tell yourself, wherever you may be, it couldn't happen here.”

 

Kolchak will return in "The Night Strangler"

Titans (2018) – Pilot Review

Do you like your superhero stories dark and gritty, with angst-ridden heroes fighting their tragic history? Well have I got a show for you. Creators Geoff Johns, Greg Berlanti, and Akiva Goldsman have brought forth a new DC television show that makes the Suicide Squad movie look warm and fluffy by comparison. This series is definitely not aimed at the kids who recently went to see Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, as not only are “F” bombs dropped here, but these heroes also brutally murder their enemies, with levels of violence one does not expect to see on a television superhero show. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it will certainly be interesting to see what direction the series takes.

We are first introduced to Rachel Roth (Teagan Croft), a troubled teen who is plagued by nightmares of a circus trapeze act that ends in tragedy when two of the three “Flying Grayson” fall to their deaths, leaving their son an orphan. Those familiar with Batman lore know this to be the origin of Robin, and we do get a glimpse of Bruce Wayne placing his hand on the grieving boy, but like the series Gotham, don’t expect to see Batman ever making an appearance.

Question: Wouldn’t having a trapeze act without a net, one where part of that act is a young boy, be the definition of Child Endangerment?

We quickly learn that Rachel isn’t your typical troubled teen, that she has her mother lock her in her room at night – with a door covered in crucifixes – is our first clue that she’s more than your run of the mill goth girl, but when a strange man arrives at their home, murders her mother, and tries to take her away, she sends him flying with a telekinetic attack. Turns out that Rachel – who will later be known by her superhero name Raven – is a mystical empath who is the daughter of a demon, and the strange man was part of some cult that believes she has to be sacrificed to save the world from evil forces. Rachel flees the scene and ends up on a bus bound for Detroit.

 

Thank god she never got invited to the Prom.

Lucky for her, Dick Grayson (Brenton Thwaites), the poor orphan boy from her vision, is now a police detective in Detroit, but even luckier is the fact that he’s also the ex-partner of the legendary vigilante known as Batman, so taking on an evil cult should be no problem. This is a pretty good set-up for a show, and Teagan Croft gives us a very sympathetic character to root for, but then Titans goes and makes a big comic book misstep by having adult Dick Grayson dressing up as Robin, when at this point in his career he would have become Nightwing already. Later in this series, Jason Todd is apparently going to make a cameo as Batman’s new Robin, which only compounds the issue of Grayson still wearing the Robin costume — why not just introduce Grayson as Nightwing? Well of course the answer to that stems from the fact that your average television viewer wouldn’t know Nightwing from a hole in the ground, so they stick Dick in a Robin costume and call it a day. And sure, as Robin, he was a founding member of this team, but that was back when it was the Teen Titans, and Dick Grayson was first stepping out from under Batman’s shadow.

 

This is not how you step out from under Batman’s shadow.

Brenton Thwaites is a fine actor, but this portrayal of Robin could put some viewers off; we get the cliché cop element where we learn he doesn’t like working with a partner – though his history with Batman does add a nice level to this trope. However, when we see him fighting as Robin, it is bloody brutal, and I do mean bloody – he drags one crook's face across a brick wall, another across broken glass, and treats rib cages like cheap piñatas – and what makes this a strange choice is later, when we get Dick explaining to his new partner on the force, Amy Rohrbach (Lindsey Gort), that he doesn’t like partners because his last one solved everything with his fists. Not only is that an unfair description of Batman, but all we see out of this Robin is a brutal psychopath who bloodily maims people in the name of justice.

 

"Am I dark and gritty enough for you?"

Now to be fair, these guys were drug dealers, and one of them got on Robin’s radar because he was a child abuser, but there isn’t much on display here that sets him apart from his old mentor when it comes to doling out justice. The key problem I had with Robin’s introduction here was not so much the level of violence on display, but his overall attitude, because though this fight sequence was wonderfully choreographed, it was also horribly undercut by Robin’s final retort, “Fuck Batman.” And what brought on such a hostile reaction, you ask? Well, when Robin bursts in on the scene, the crooks immediately look around to see where Batman is, assuming if Robin is around Batman can't be far behind, but when they realize there is no guy in a cape and cowl, they comment, “The little birdy's alone,” as if Robin by himself isn’t a threat. Given that this takes place in Detroit, I’ll try and let slide how dumb the assumption is that Robin isn't a badass, but it seems as if this comment is what really sets Robin off on his violent assault — not just because they are drug dealers and child abusers.

 

Apparently disrespecting Robin is the bigger crime here.

This bitter violent Robin is the only element I found a tad off, the rest of the show fires on all cylinders, and the introductions of Dick Grayson and Raven is nicely intercut with events happening over in Austria, where we are introduced to our third member Kori Anders (Anna Diop), who awakens in a bullet-ridden car wreck with amnesia, where she immediately has to flee some gun toting thugs.  Eventually, she makes it back to her hotel to learn that she is super rich – having rented out the entire top floor of the hotel – has a dude locked in a closet, and that she has super powers to go along with being super rich. Her little mystery will lead her to a gangster named Konstantin Kovar, who she apparently faked a love interest in so that she could track down Rachel – see things are tying together – but Kovar doesn’t take being betrayed lightly, and he tries to shoot her. this does not go well for Kovar as she quickly immolates him and his goons in a firestorm.

 

Trying to kill Starfire is not conducive to a long life.

This show is dark, and I don’t just mean the blue filter that DC tends to paint on all their projects, but its whole tone is vastly different than what their other television shows are producing at the moment, and is more in keeping with what we see in the theatrically released stuff of the DC Extended Universe. Being that DC has been doing great with shows like The Flash and Supergirl, while their movies are critically drubbed, this may seem like a strange tactic, but one can’t really tell what direction this series will take just from seeing the pilot, and a lighter tone could easily be introduced to counterbalance the dark. We do get a glimpse of Beast Boy (Ryan Potter) at the end of this episode and his shape-shifting character is a chief comedic element in the Teen Titans comics, so hopefully he will bring a little levity to the proceedings here as well.

 

We can also hope they get better CGI for his transformations.

Overall, I’m optimistic going forward with this version of Titans; the cast they’ve assembled all show great promise, the mystery behind Rachel’s demonic parentage and her connection to Starfire opens up countless opportunities for action and drama, and if the showrunners can just let Dick Grayson get over himself we could have a really good series on are hands. I honestly look forward to see in what direction they take these characters, as they certainly aren’t quite the ones I grew up loving, but once again that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Note: Teen Titans fans probably noticed the lack of Cyborg in this show, but his involvement in the DC Extended Movie Universe most likely precludes his involvement here.

Venom (2018) – Review

How does one go about making a Venom movie without even mentioning the name Spider-Man? This was the challenge Sony Pictures set for the three screenwriters that were tasked to salvage a character the studio had previously ruined in the third Raimi Spider-Man movie; and just to make it a little tougher, Venom’s first solo outing would also have to be a PG-13. This is like telling someone to enter the Daytona 500 but with a soapbox derby car that doesn’t even have wheels. Venom is a movie that was clearly the victim of committee decision making, with massive editing overhauls that seemed hell-bent on making the film into a nonsensical mess. Yet the end result wasn't the flaming dumpster fire I'd expected — don't get me wrong, it's still a pretty bad movie — but it managed to be somewhat entertaining at times.

The film’s protagonist is edgy investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) – we know he’s edgy because he always has a five o’clock shadow and drives a motorcycle – and he is damn sure that billionaire CEO, and founder of Life Foundation, Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), is doing some evil shit in his super-secret lab – think Doctor Octopus meets Elon Musk – and of course, Eddie is right. An exploratory space mission has returned with four symbiotic lifeforms – though only three make it back to the lab as one decides to body-hop across Asia for some reason – and Drake immediately jumps to human trials, which seems to involve tossing homeless people into a sealed room with an alien symbiote. Unfortunately, the hosts keep dying so trips to Alpha Centauri will have to be put on hold. Now, why would Drake do such a thing, you ask? Well, to put it simply, it's because he's EVIL, and that is basically his sole character trait. Drake's whole deal is about improving humanity so that we can survive in space, but this is nothing more than a screenwriter's smokescreen to hide the fact that they are clearly making things up as they go, as we spend so much time with evil Elon Musk and yet learn nothing.

 

We can now check off the box labeled “One Dimensional Bland Marvel Villain.”

Eddie gets a little overzealous with his edgy journalism and he accuses Drake of things he has no evidence to support, while also abusing the trust of his fiancée Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), getting her fired from her law firm. This leads to Eddie also getting shit-canned and him eventually sneaking into Life Foundation, with the help of a scientist who suddenly developed a moral compass, and while stumbling around the lab, Eddie is infected with a symbiote.  This results in Eddie being able to smash through doors, shoot out tentacles to fight off goons, and bite the heads off bad people.  Not your typical hero stuff, but he seems to have fun with it, and Tom Hardy's back-and-forth arguments with the symbiote is this film's main saving grace.

Due to some atrocious editing, this film is heavily front-loaded with character development that we really don’t need; I mean, how much backstory does one need for a vigilante-alien symbiote anti-hero? Now when the film finally gets down to some decent Venom-fueled action, there is a lot of fun to be had, most of this stemming from the aforementioned verbal banter between Eddie Brock and Venom, with the film almost becoming a buddy picture of sorts (but one where half of the team likes to eat people’s heads).

 

“We’re a Lethal Weapon!”

The highlight of the film is Eddie/Venom’s first night out, which entails a high speed chase through the streets of San Francisco, with tons of generic goons and exploding drones at every turn. Unfortunately, this is also Eddie/Venom’s last night out, as the movie then races to the big showdown with the Big Bad without bothering to work out what the plot is about, or actually having one for that matter. I’m not sure how much overall control Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer had with the end product — I'll be generous and assume not much — but Venom is a structural mess with tonal shifts that give the viewer whiplash; one minute we get a goofy moment of Eddie taking a bath in a tank full of live lobsters, and the next he and the symbiote are murdering an entire SWAT team. Whenthe film careens wildly towards its big climax, we are once again stuck watching two computer generated creations fighting each other endlessly with the only danger being in my jaw locking up during one of my long yawns. Not only is it insanely boring to watch two computer cartoons punch each other over and over again — I'm looking at you Black Panther — but the whole thing is all shot in the dark with shaky-cam, so we don’t have a clue as to what exactly is happening.

 

I dare you to explain what is going on in this shot.

I’ve been a huge fan of Tom Hardy since I saw him in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, a true tour de force of acting, and by god he truly swings for the fences in this movie as well; not only is he incredibly entertaining as the “out-of-his-depths” Eddie Brock, but he’s also the film’s only redeeming quality. The CGI drifts between passable to lackluster, while plot and character motivations shift and change like the wind with no context whatsoever, and the supporting cast is given nothing to do but either spout or receive expository dialogue whenever the script is in danger of going off the rails. There is an especially egregious example of this in the scene where Eddie/Venom are in Anne’s car – as they race off to the hospital – and we get Venom explaining his weaknesses to the two of them, for no bloody reason.

Venom - "Sound harms us."
Anne - "So it's like your Kryptonite?"
Venom - "Fire also hurts us...and shellfish...we're also lactose intolerant."   * I’m paraphrasing

This is akin to Venom stating, "Hi, I'm an alien parasite that eats people, but if you want to get rid of me you have two options, sound and fire." There is absolutely no purpose for Venom to volunteer such sensitive information, especially to the two people who are currently racing to the hospital to find a way to remove the symbiote, and that is just one of many clunky moments the film suffers from. There could be a 180 minute cut of this film out there that makes some semblance of sense, but the 114 minute version that hit theaters is a garbled mess — to be fair, at times it was at least an entertaining garbled mess. If the film had been played as hard “R” dark comedy we could have had something special here – with Hardy giving us a blend of Jim Carrey’s The Mask and Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness – but instead the script consistently kneecapped itself when it should have been going balls-to-the-wall crazy.

 

“Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the symbiote.”

In conclusion, I’ll say that making this Venom movie without even mentioning Spider-Man was a pretty stupid idea, but making a PG-13 Venom standalone movie – where most of the action is muddled and dark – was an inexcusably moronic decision, and is also another example of Tom Hardy’s talents being greatly misused. So even though Venom was not the dumpster fire I was worried it would be, and as entertaining as Mr. Hardy was, it’s still another case of Sony Pictures dropping the ball big time, in what seems to be their ongoing mission to shit on the Marvel Universe.

Down a Dark Hall (2018) – Review

Setting your gothic horror movie in an “old dark house” is almost a prerequisite – Robert Wise’s The Haunting and Peter Medak’s The Changeling are prime examples of this done well – but if all you have is dark halls and spooky noises to offer, there is a good chance your film will be forgotten, and there are many films guilty of using this crutch while doing nothing original with it. Enter Rodrigo Cortés's adaptation of Lois Duncan’s young adult story Down a Dark Hall, which deals with an all-girl Hogwarts, if Hogwarts was designed by Dario Argento and housed juvenile delinquents instead of wizards, and for his film, Cortés decided to add a little mystery to spice up the proceedings.

Kit Gordy (AnnaSophia Robb) is your typical troubled youth: her father died when she was young and she has been acting up ever since, facing expulsion for setting fire to her school, she is offered a spot at Blackwood Academy, an exclusive all-girls school that headmistress Madame Duret (Uma Thurman) ensures will bring out one's hidden talents. Packed off by her beleaguered mother (Kirsty Mitchell), and sad sack stepdad (Jim Sturgeon), poor Kit soon finds herself in a situation far beyond her control; stranger yet is finding out that there are to be only four other classmates at Blackwood.

 

A student body of five for this place is a big red flag.

Joining Kit at Blackwood is a small collection of misfits, Izzy (Isabelle Fuhrman), Sierra (Rosie Day), Ashley (Taylor Russell) and Veronica (Victoria Moroles) who will be Kit’s primary school antagonist, that is until the supernatural shit hits the fan. The amount of staff on hand is equally small, there being only four teachers, with Madame Duret teaching art, Professor Farley (Pip Torrens) mathematics, Lit Prof Miss Sinclair (Jodhi May) and music is to be taught by Duret’s hunky son Jules (Noah Silver).

 

I’m not sure if this is an appropriate teaching technique for young girls.

The only other staff member, Mrs. Olonsky (Rebecca Front), is the powerful right arm of Madame Duret — but bullies and imposing matrons are the least of these girls’ problems, for suddenly Kit is playing the piano like a virtuoso, Sierra is quickly painting like an old master, Izzy becomes a math prodigy – despite previously having failed algebra – and high romantic prose is gushing forth from Ashley as if she was the offspring of Byron and Shelley. Now becoming suddenly gifted may not seem like a problem – and at first it seems pretty damn cool – but soon the obsession with these new abilities devolves into mania where sleep, food and sanity are left in the rear-view mirror. These newfound gifts seem more like possession than anything organically achieved, and Kit starts to suspect that something more devious is at work here.

 

I wonder if the forbidden wing of the school could be important.

As Kit’s classmates become drained, as well as fearfully plagued by night visits by their dark muses, she eventually teams up with Veronica to go full on Nancy Drew, with late night researching of the library and explorations of the forbidden wing. Can these two uncover the mystery of Blackwood before the forces of evil destroy them? Could Madame Duret be some kind of educational succubi?  As secrets are exposed – and villains uncovered – we are treated to several suspenseful and unnerving moments, all stemming from the fact that we do actually care if these misfits survive.

Down a Dark Hall offers a nice spooky atmosphere – phantom figures dancing in out of the edge of your vision – and the young cast all give very good performances, Victoria Molores’s hard bitten bully is a particular delight, and Uma Thurman does her best in what is a pretty traditional role for this kind of film. As the film is based on a book for young readers, it’s not all that surprising that there isn’t a plethora of scares – plenty of creepy moments but not much else to give young viewers nightmares – but the mystery behind Blackwood Academy is really what sells this movie.

 

The film doesn’t stint on ghosts, but their agenda is what makes the story interesting.

When the film’s supernatural elements go into overdrive, we truly feel for these poor girls – being seriously outnumbered as they are is totally unfair – and Madame Duret makes for quite the villain. The costumes by Patricia Monne are simply beautiful and the sets are also quite extraordinary, which is pretty much required in this type of film, but Víctor Molero's production designs are really something to behold, and could be held up against even the most prestigious films. Hardcore horror fans may find this move a little quaint at times, and it certainly doesn’t hold a candle to similar films like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, but overall, this is a solid horror/mystery movie, one that I can recommend to parents as a good entry into the genre.

 

Your kids may need a nightlight on after watching this.

Delirium (2018) – Review

What is reality and what is a delusion? This quandary is the heart of many psychological/horror movies, and Blumhouse Production's Delirium (formerly known as Home) does its best to tap into that primal fear of, “If you can’t trust what you see, who do you trust?” But then, the film drops the ball with a horrendously complicated plot, one that does its best to fool the protagonist as well as the audience, and fails.

In director Dennis Iliadis' latest film Delirium, we get the story of a man recently released from a mental institution who inherits his late father’s mansion – to hopefully get a fresh start – only to discover that his past isn’t quite done with him yet. Our protagonist is Tom Walker (Topher Grace), the man being released from said mental institution – which he spent years there for an undisclosed crime – and the good doctor sends him off into the world with the simple advice of “Trust your brain not your eyes.” Now is Tom being sent to a halfway house to ease him back into the real world – having been incarcerated since he was a young teen, that would seem to be a good idea – or is he going to live with a surviving family member? Nope, apparently he just inherited his dad’s sprawling mansion – good ole dad, having committed suicide mere days ago – and so he is packed off to live inside the place that could very well be the seat of his personal psychosis.

 

He’s haunted by serious daddy issues.

So, right off the hop we are asked to swallow a pretty ridiculous premise – if the doctor was later revealed to be part of some sort of conspiracy, that would have helped, but alas, we never see that quack again – and the factors revolving around Tom’s release get even worse as we learn the terms of his parole, terms that make little to no sense.
• He is under house arrest in the spooky mansion his dad just died in. I’m not sure what legitimate doctor would find that a healthy environment for a mental patient.
• His ankle monitor will go off if he so much as steps one foot outside the front door of the house, yet the mansion’s grounds are incredibly expansive. So he can’t even walk in the bloody garden?
• He is allowed no visitors – other than his parole officer – for the entire run of his house arrest. How is that even legal?

To make things even worse, his parole officer (Patricia Clarkson) tries to make out with him – this comes so out of left-field, it’s almost comical – and when Tom rebuffs her sexual advances, she storms off, taking his meds with her, and leaving him alone with his delusions. And just what kind of delusions does Tom suffer from? Well, aside from seeing his dead dad – with a horrifically chewed up face due to the combination of his body being found days after his suicide and a hungry dog – we are kept guessing as to what is real and what is an illusion. The key factor here is director Dennis Iliadis attempting to keep the audience wondering “What is real and what is just in Tom's head,” and this comes not from clever writing but from the fact that all the supporting characters act in such an unbelievable fashion that you have to assume they are all part of Tom’s mental breakdown.

• There is the aforementioned hard-assed parole officer full of sexual misconduct.
• We get Tom’s older brother Alex (Callan Mulvey) popping in and out of rooms like a ghost, even though he is supposed to be in prison.
• Then there is Lynn (Genesis Rodriguez), the delivery girl from the local grocery store, who apparently has a thing for guys recently released from mental institutions.

 

“Hi Tom, I’m your delivery girl/sexual fantasy.”

Aside from surprise visits – which at least gives us a break from Topher Grace’s rather unconvincing acting – we get Tom discovering that his father (Robin Thomas) – a respected senator – may have had some dark secrets of his own. Tom finds a hidden passageway behind the walls, that lead to peep holes that his father obviously used to spy on his family, and most damning is a two-way mirror in the master bedroom that reveals a hidden camera, one that has recorded some very bizarre shit.

 

Was his dad into a bizarre sexual fetish or was he auditioning for the lead in Saw?

As the movie goes on, we learn more about Tom’s past – what particular horrific crime landed him in a psych ward and why his brother is in prison – but the mysteries really don’t add up to anything we actually care about. Who is that mysterious caller on that private line? Is Alex a hallucination or did he actually escape prison? Why is there a severed tongue hidden inside the indoor pool's control box? Did Tom’s mother really abandon her family all those years ago? Is this house actually haunted? All of these questions are sort of answered – some of which you will have guessed well in advance of the big reveal – but overall I didn’t care enough about Tom to make the effort.

 

Why is there a secret room under the pool? The bigger question is, who cares?

Delirium is well shot – cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. should get most of the credit for what does work in this film – and the supporting cast does the best with what they were given, which to be fair, wasn’t much, but the film’s protagonist Topher Grace’s Tom Walker is just too unlikable of a character for a viewer to get behind. Delirium crumbles under a shaky premise – that even the most talented cast would have had a hard time holding up – resulting in a film that has, at best, a few creepy moments, but overall is just forgettable.