Lake Placid: Legacy (2018) – Review

If you can make a six-film franchise out of the comedy classic Tremors – a movie about burrowing monsters terrorizing a small town in Nevada – then why can’t a series about giant man-eating crocodiles terrorizing people in Maine work, too? One could, of course, argue the point that neither Tremors nor the original Lake Placid themselves warranted sequels, let alone five of them, but with cheap computer generated effects and low budget casting, there's money to be made in them there hills…or lakes. With Lake Placid: Legacy, we get the typical entry that tries to pretend the previous sequels didn’t exist – a tactic familiar with fans of the Godzilla franchise – without any reference to the Bickerman family that made up the bulk of the previous sequels, as this sixth installment is to be considered a direct sequel to the 1999 original, in a chapter that would answer all those questions nobody was asking.

A group of Eco-terrorists, led by a gruff, bearded moron named Sam (Tim Rozon), are goaded into taking one final mission – my God, they were just two days from retirement – by Sam’s old partner Dane (Maxim Baldry). So the group heads to a mysterious location that somehow has been removed from Google Maps, and if our intrepid explorers reach this spot before Dane and his crew does – which is hard to believe possible as  Dane sent his video taunt from that location – then they will win $100,000 dollars. Now, I’ve seen movies with more implausible and ridiculous premises than what we have here – the latest Predator movie being a perfect example of this – but with Lake Placid: Legacy, not only is the reasoning for our cast of characters journeying into danger moronic, and so thin that it’s basically transparent, but there is almost no reason for doing so.

 

None of these asshats question why a $100 grand bounty would be offered for such a task.

The group is pushed into accepting this challenge by fellow member Spenser (Craig Stein), who wins them over with the unassailable argument of “The money, seriously.” Yet when they arrive at this mysterious lake, he’s the one who immediately starts bitching about everything that goes wrong, as if he was not the one who bullied them into taking the dare in the first place. That he is a black man in a horror movie should have been the first red flag that him taking this challenge was a bad idea. Joining the group are two local guides, who are along simply to add more food to the menu, and all they do is complain about how this job could be dangerous and also very illegal. Which it is, but what makes this hilariously stupid is that the chief guide, an ex-Marine named Pennie (Alisha Bailey), tries to reassure her partner that guiding a group of Eco-terrorists onto private property is not "on them," as if only Sam and his crew would be found guilty of trespassing. I may not have gone to law school, but I don't think she quite understands how trespassing works; “We only brought them here” is not a good defense.

 

“I survived fighting in Afghanistan, and will not be the first black person eaten in this film!”

Our group of Eco-Idiots then discover Dane’s campsite, which has been completely torn apart — with blood and entrails leading off into the forest — and when Dane’s GoPro is discovered revealing found footage of “the attack,” we get the asshat Spenser claiming that Dane is probably punking them, but the belief that it's all a hoax quickly ends when they find the upper torso of one of Dane’s people hanging from a tree. Next, they come across a long abandoned facility – that was mentioned in Dane’s found footage – so they decide to go inside in hopes of finding a radio and medical supplies, and thus, the rest of the film is mostly these idiots wandering up and down dark and dank corridors waiting to be eaten.

The movie takes place in a mostly dark setting to hide how bad the CGI for the giant crocodile is, and its embarrassingly bad appearance is the only source of true humor in the film, which is a pretty big misstep when you consider that it was the use of humor that made the original film a success in the first place.

 

Sorry guys, but the red filter doesn’t hide how bad your croc looks.

In the position of “slumming actor” is Joe Pantoliano, who plays the villainous Henderson, the man that hired Dane to get him into this abandoned facility so that he could retrieve a DNA sample from the giant crocodile. Apparently, this facility was once the home of an evil conglomerate's research lab – like there are any other kinds - and they were making giant crocodiles to "change medicine forever," as a stem cell from one of these crocs could save countless lives, and this was all to be achieved by somehow combining DNA from an extinct dinosaur croc with a modern one. Yeah, that checks out. When the place was shut down, one of the crocodile handlers left with one of the specimens, to his home in Lake Placid, Maine. So that’d be the whole “legacy” part of the title, but it basically means nothing to the piece of crap we’re watching.

 

“Could someone please plug me back into The Matrix?”

Lake Placid: Legacy is a perfect example of a direct-to-video sequel that is just phoning it in, as there isn’t one ounce of originality to be found anywhere in its 90-minute run-time, all we get is just a group of morons running into the dark facility and then some of them running back out of the facility into the dark forest, then someone will run back into the facility, all while the CGI monster pops up like a teleporting Jason Voorhees to kill them. It is all so redundant and lame. There's nothing on display here that even a bad movie-lover could sink his teeth into, as boredom is the operative word here, and even the perquisite gore is lame and goofy. Case in point, the croc seems to seize most its prey head first – even though we often see the victim’s hanging out of the maw with head and arms flailing – but then for some reason the killer croc leaves the bloody upper torso lying around uneaten, it even seems to have a trophy room where it stashes the remains.

 

Is this croc a serial killer or just a real picky eater?

I thought Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell was bad – and that film really is terrible – but Lake Placid: Legacy lowers the franchise sequel bar even further with this entry, as not only is the plot ludicrous and malformed, but the entire cast, especially poor Joe Pantoliano, all look to be having the worst time of their lives. This film is not in the “so bad it’s good” category, as there is simply no fun to be had while viewing it, and poking fun at this entry would be like shooting fish in a barrel, only not as entertaining. If you happen to come across this film while flipping channels one night, do not, repeat, do not stop and watch this thing; just keep on surfing.

 

This is one legacy you don’t want to inherit.

Impulse: Season One (2018) – Review

In 2008, director Doug Liman took Stephen Gould’s YA science fiction novel Jumper to the big screen – while completely abandoning everything that made the book so popular, yet ten years later, and we find Liman back with another run out in the universe of Jumper, only this time as a web series for YouTube Premium. Now, the series may be called Impulse, but other than the main protagonist being a teenage girl dealing with the travails of high school, there is literally nothing in this series that bares any resemblance to the book of the same name – or even with what we saw in the movie Jumper, for that matter – and aside from the power of teleportation, I’d be hard-pressed to find any ties between this series and the book. But funny enough, this didn’t bother me at all – unlike how pissed off I was with the Jumper movie – as the show is a much darker and more serious young adult drama than I had expected.

Sixteen year-old Henrietta "Henry" Coles (Maddie Hasson) is an outsider, she dresses in army surplus attire and enjoys sneaking a pot break when no one is looking, and part of this is due to the vagabond nature of her life with her mother Cleo Coles (Missi Pyle), as Cleo has left four relationships and four towns in her wake. The fifth and current relationship is with Thomas Hope (Matt Gordon), a widower with a teenage daughter of his own named Jenna (Sarah Desjardins), a girl who does everything she can to fit in with those at school and to be the perfect daughter. There is not a lot of harmony with this group, which isn't helped by Henry’s “I don’t give a fuck” attitude, or her being caught by the police for tagging — her car being sold to pay the fine — and this all adds up to a high-stress household, but it is when Henry goes out with the town’s “Golden Boy” Clay Boone (Tanner Stine) that things go completely off the rails for her.  Early on, we learn that Henry is afflicted with severe seizures that she takes medications to control, but we soon discover that medication isn't going to help at all with what's really going on with Henry, and when Clay Boone fails to understand the “No means no” aspect of their making out, the little shit soon finds himself paralyzed and in a coma. Turns out her seizures are stress related and sexual assault is about as stressful as it gets, so during this particular seizure, Clay’s truck seems to slowly implode, and then Henry teleports to the safety of her bedroom.

It is this horrific assault that colours the nine remaining episodes of season one; it would be easy for a “superhero show” to use such a sexual assault in an exploitative manner, but showrunner Lauren LeFranc works hard to prevent this from being the case, and the show admirably deals with the emotional fallout of such an event, from the victim questioning her own actions to the effect it has on those around her. Maddie Hasson gives us a full-fledged character with her depiction of Henry, a person who is both strong and flawed at the same time, a young woman truly in search of who she is. Backing her up is actress Sarah Desjardins as the “step-sister,” a young woman questioning her own sexuality and place in the world, and these two strong young women get unusual direction from classmate Townes Linderman (Daniel Maslany), an autistic teen who is the first to clue into the fact that Henry is gifted in ways more commonly found in the pages of The X-Men.

Unfortunately for Henry, this small town has more than teen rapists to worry about, as Clay’s father Bill Boone (David James Elliott) not only owns one of the town’s most successful businesses, a big car dealership, but it’s also the front for a drug trafficking syndicate that receives its supply of illegal opioids from an evil Canadian Mennonite family — and that's not something one sees in your typical drama superpower television show. So poor Henry gets sucked into the world of the Boone family, which she most decidedly wants no part of, and all the while she's trying to keep the secret of what actually happened to Clay on that fateful day – seizure-inducing implosions and teleportation being a hard thing to sell to your average parent or police officer. The balance of Henry’s tough-girl exterior and inner fragility is exceptional, and seeing her attempting to reconcile the events of the attack is heartwrenching at times. The only negative comment I can really make about this show is that it tends to put the “girl can teleport” on the backburner a little too often.

The show hints at a secret organization that is hunting teleporters – we see a fight between a teleporter and some poor dude as the show’s cold open – but we don’t learn much about them or what their deal is, aside from the occasional appearance of Callum Keith Rennie as some shadowy agent tracking down Jumpers. As mentioned earlier, this series has little to nothing to do with the book it is apparently based upon – there is certainly no such sexual assault on our heroine in the book – nor does this series have the sense of fun and freedom that one would associate with the ability to be anywhere in the blink of an eye. In this first season, Henry barely has any control over this power — no cool teleporting combat scenes that are found in the book — as it's treated as more of a curse than a gift, and we can only hope that season two will lighten things up a tad.

Stray Thoughts:

• The Mennonite drug cartel reminded me of the villainous Amish in Cinemax’s Banshee.
• Clay’s older brother Lucas's (Craig Arnold) response to Henry’s refusal to discuss Clay’s accident is to toss her into the trunk of his car. This guy makes Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman look like a genius.
• Henry calls upon an old boyfriend for help, and then he kind of vanishes from the show.
• The visual look of the “Jumping” is quite different from what the movie depicted, and I like how the destructive nature of it lessens over time as if she is getting better at it.
• The shadowy organization hunting teleporters does not look to be the same as the religious zealots found in the movie, and that is a definite plus.

Impulse gives us a strong first season, and the young cast all give fantastic performances with fully-formed characters, but with much of this season focusing on dark subject matter, we don’t get a lot of the “fun moments” I’d expected from a show about a teleporting teenager, so I hope come next year we find the series balancing the darker mysterious elements with a lighter tone as well. Regardless of any tonal qualms, I heartily recommend checking this show out, just don’t expect it to be anything like the source material.

Hell Night (1981) – Review

The Golden Age of the slasher film ran from 1968 to 1974 (dominated by directors like John Carpenter and Wes Craven), and smack dab in the middle of this era was a little gem called Hell Night. Taking a break from such "seminal" works as Wild Horse Hank and Roller Boogie, Linda Blair returned to the horror genre to play the final girl in a film that both used the tropes of the genre, but also broke new ground — and though Hell Night may never be as well-known as Halloween or Friday the 13th, it has stood the test of time while other lesser examples have fallen to the wayside.

 The movie opens with Alpha Sigma Rho president Peter Bennett (Kevin Brophy) hosting a pledge party for their annual “Hell Night,” where four pledges, Marti Gaines (Linda Blair), Seth (Vincent Van Patten), Jeff Reed (Peter Barton), and Denise Dunsmore (Suki Goodwin), are taken to the notorious Garth Manor, an abandoned mansion with a horrifying history. To win their spots in their respective fraternities or sororities, the pledges must last the night – six hours until dawn. Peter has no intention of making things easy on them, however, starting with the reciting of the chilling history lesson of Garth Manor.

 

Trivia: Exterior locations were shot at the Kimberly Crest Mansion.

Horror Trope #16 –The Spooky Legend: We learn from Peter that a man named Ramon Garth, who with his wife Lillian had four horribly deformed children; a mongoloid boy named Morris; Suzanna, a girl so hideous you could not tell her gender; Margaret, who could neither speak, see nor hear; and Andrew, who for his first fourteen years never uttered a word, just grunted like an animal. Twelve years ago, Raymond decided he could no longer live in that kind of freak show — fourteen years being more than enough for him — so he murdered his wife and three of the children, before hanging himself. Poor Andrew was forced to witness the slaughter of his family, but when the police arrived, they found a note from Raymond detailing the murder of his wife and three children, yet only three bodies were found, and no one ever saw Andrew again. To this day, it is believed that Andrew stills lives somewhere on the grounds of Garth Manor.

 

I must say the fake ghost that Peter comes up with is scarier than the actual killer.

Spooky stories aren’t the only thing in Peter’s arsenal, for once the four pledges have paired off for the night – Marti the smart girl with Jeff the kid from an affluent home, and surfer boy Seth with party girl Denise – he arrives back at Garth Manor along with two other students: May (Jenny Neumann) and Scott (Jimmy Sturtevant), and they proceed to rig up some scares for the pledges; hidden speakers that issue blood curdling screams, a ghost apparition that stalks after Marti, and a corpse to drop in at an inopportune moment, but unfortunately for Peter and his two stooges, things don’t go quite as planned. Turns out there may be some truth to the legend of deformed Andrew stalking the grounds of Garth Manor, and one by one our cast of characters are picked off by a hideous figure.

 

Getting ahead in a sorority is tough business.

One key element that makes Hell Night stand out from its slasher contemporaries is that we aren’t just waiting, if not actively hoping, for the characters to get murdered, as they are all quite likable and we are given enough time to come to care about each of them. This is not something that can be said about your average cast of a Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movie, and even Peter and his pranking co-conspirators are not treated like villainous assholes, as none of their pranks would have harmed anyone and are actually pretty tame when compared to real hazing practices you hear about today. Another element that sets Hell Night apart is how gorgeous the film looks; cinematographer Mac Ahlberg does amazing work with shadow and candlelight, and every actor should be sending him Christmas cards every year for how good he makes them look.

 

It’s a horror film lit as if it was Barry Lyndon.

Horror Trope #9 – “Stay here, I’ll go and check it out” Now, just because all the characters in Hell Night are likable doesn’t mean they don’t do vastly stupid things. Whenever Jeff isn’t abandoning Marti to check out some noise he’s heard, he's leading her into the bowels of the manor, on what one must assume is some kind of suicide mission. Refusing to be left alone – again – Marti follows him down a secret passageway, the one the killer had just fled through, into a cave system deep below the house. And what exactly is Jeff’s reasoning for doing this? Well, when Marti comments that what they are doing is "crazy," he responds, “I’m not stopping until I get him. He knows this house better than we do and if we don’t get him now, he’s gonna get us.” Call me crazy, but following a killer into a maze of tunnels, passageways that he knows better than you do, is not conducive to a long life. Even worse is when they eventually come across the killer, Jeff’s immediate reaction is to turn around and run away, even though he is armed with a pitchfork and the killer has nothing.

 

What was your goddamn plan, Jeff?

Hell Night is a beautifully shot film, with a nice cast of talented young actors, and though it may have a slower pace than your average slasher film, it still manages to keep you at the edge of your seat as our characters are chased through cobwebbed hallways, down dank tunnels and through dark hedge mazes, all leading to the big “final girl” confrontation. Director Tom DeSimone has orchestrated a nice little horror gem — with the required jump-scares but without gratuitous nudity and excessive gore — making this a horror movie that could be considered “fun for the whole family.” Yet as good as the film is, it's still not quite perfect, but to get into that I must veer into spoiler territory.

At one point in the film, Seth manages to escape the grounds of Garth Manor, helped over the locked gate by Marti and Jeff, and he makes his way to the local police station. It's there that he finds that the police have become fed up with the drunken antics of the fraternities and thus don’t take his claims of murder seriously, and so Seth steals a shotgun from the police evidence locker and heads back to Garth Manor. Re-entering the grounds, through a hole he discovers in the steel fence, he encounters the hideous creature we assume is Andrew Garth. They struggle for a bit and Seth manages to come out on top as he shoots and kills Andrew, but of course things can't be that easy. He runs into the manor house to inform Marti and Jeff that their hell night is truly over, only to be suddenly killed. How is that possible, you ask?  The killer looked very, very dead, and as a matter of fact, the guy Seth fought is truly dead – though we were still subjected to the “killer isn’t really dead” jump scare, but then Seth put a second round into the bastard – so who is this deformed monstrosity that just killed our supposed hero?

 

“Here’s Morris!”

Now in the story told earlier by Peter, we learned that the son named Morris had his head bashed it, which sounds rather fatal, but it is also mentioned that only three corpses were found — which I guess would then be Norman Garth, his wife Lillian and their two daughters — so somehow Morris survived the head bashing and has been living in hiding with his brother Andrew. If this sounds a little thin, and kind of plugged in, you’d be right, as Hell Night’s screenwriter Randy Feldman didn’t find out about the second killer reveal until he went to the film’s premier. Apparently, the producers wanted to juice up the ending, so they decided to add another deformed madman to chase Linda Blair around for the final act. So for those of you who thought the two-killer concept in Scream was completely original, you’d be wrong, it’s just that Wes Craven did it better. Regardless of how clunking the last acts “startling reveal” was, it doesn’t lessen the fun and thrills to be had in viewing Hell Night, and I can heartily recommend this one to fans of the genre.

Stray Thoughts:

• What kind of pledge night consists of only four initiates?
• This Hell Night has been a yearly initiation for some time, so why did killings only happen on this particular night?
• Sleeping in 12 year-old bedding would be rather disgusting.
• Not sure how these yahoos pulled off the transparent ghost effect.
• Police would not ignore a report of murder, even if it was most likely a prank.
• Police also don’t tend to leave evidence lockers open to the public.
• Horror Trope #23 – Killer has trophy room of corpses.

 

Classic serial killer chic.

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"