NAILBITER teaser

Very short teaser for Patrick Rea's upcoming feature.

Nailbiter - Teaser Trailer #2
by dreadcentral

More vidia obscura for your Halloween pleasure...


Messiah of Evil is what's been called an 'unknown gem' from the early 70's, made by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (friends of George Lucas who wrote AMERICAN GRAFFITI, INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and dialog punch up for STAR WARS -- more widely known as the team responsible for HOWARD THE DUCK). This gets released next week in a deluxe DVD package, but I found a barebones copy and decided to see if it lived up to the hype.

It's not totally bad - it's sort of a Lovecraftian story without anything to do with Lovecraft per se; but it's just hampered by some really bad decision making, such as the song sung over the main and end titles - has nothing to do with the film whatsoever, but if you weren't scared by a totally unnecessary murder as the movie starts (to show that it's a HORROR MOVIE), you'll be scared before the song is over.

A very convoluted story which involves a daughter searching for her missing artist father, who leaves behind a journal recounting sinister doings in the town, and some very strange townspeople who are zombies awaiting the titular 'Messiah', who apparently is a preacher from the late 1800's who's a survivor of The Donner Party, and pledges to spread his religion before walking into the sea, vowing to return in 100 years.

Uh... yeah. Logic is not the strong point of a good many horror movies, but this is pretty batshit on its own terms.

The movie works best when it attempts to create this sort of unreal reality, and there are plenty of surreal touches: the house and artwork of the artist/father; a really menacing albino who likes Wagner and chewing on rats; tears of blood, and a doomed man covered in paint... there are two really good setpieces that the movie is known for.

First, a sequence in a supermarket...





And the movie theater scene.




I suspect that the movie would be better had it been done by people who truly understood surrealism - or if they'd hired a European director. At least they're ditching the song in that DVD release. Worthwhile for a chill, or if you're an Argento fan and don't have access to any Argento.

SHADOW FALLS was a webseries on The Horror Channel a few years back... I vaguely knew the people involved with this, essentially two people, Kendall Sinn (writer) and Sally Cummings [now Sinn] (producer), but never had any idea of what the show was supposed to be.
Finally, I found the dvd on Netflix and got to see for myself.

Not bad.

Shadow Falls is a series of 8 short films that portray very strange events happening involving the titular town, which apparently died out in the mid-1980's... or something. It's a mystery.
Watching it brought back memories of watching TWIN PEAKS, except that Shadow Falls doesn't have that Lynch quirkiness -- it does have it's own mood and atmosphere, sort of like SILENT HILL.

It also was a bit like watching LOST - the 8 films are basically backstory and set-up for what's to come... and while some will find this intriguing, others may find it extremely frustrating to have no minor payoff at the end of the cycle. Others will also be frustrated at the method of storytelling, which is non-linear and oblique for the most part, while some will see it as a breath of some needed fresh air.

This queued up at just the right time -- The Horror Channel may be in limbo, but the show isn't; it will be resolved in a feature, SHADOW FALLS MEMORIAL that has its premiere in Kansas City on October 30.

R. I. P. Vic Mizzy

You may not know his face, but you do know his work... you grew up with it.

I Woke Up Early The Day I Died - Main Title

Catchy tune... and the animation fits like a glove.

Halloween Lead-in

Every year at this time, most bloggers with a heavy interest in either horror, or film, or both, usually do a countdown of favorite movies for the season... I'm not immune to that, but I tend to be lazy in either watching the films or writing about them. It's a heavy commitment to devote that much time to movie watching; try to balance 2 tv series, current discs for a review column, plus catching up on backlog -- no wonder most critics are weird.

Plus, I tend to not go for a lot of the tried and true -- I will bust out the original TCM; but there's only so many times one can watch HALLOWEEN or EVIL DEAD and really find something fresh; I may watch THE EXORCIST, but I don't pull that out on a regular basis... plus, it's NOT "The Version You've Never Seen", but the Theatrical Version (which I've never really seen - and with the good Friedkin commentary). I tend to go for the obscure and little known, because I tend to find some gems there... there's the just-out-on DVD TRICK 'R TREAT; I SELL THE DEAD and a nice little gem called THE BURROWERS that I found on Netflix, a horror-western that should find a wider audience; and ANTICHRIST, which kinda fits the bill under Weird Horror.

Because a lot of this stuff is so obscure, it's hard to make a recommendation to see it, when you can't even FIND it... even more frustrating is wanting to recommend things that don't exist on DVD. Like this -




If you'd seen this some 15 -18 years ago (as I did - in the Theater! - and other fans of obscurity also writing on the Net), you'd be wondering why the hell there is no legit DVD of this yet.... I mean, James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif --- plus, it's actually a pretty good film. If you don't catch the pun in the title, you're not gonna get this at all. When a travelling clerk and a bounty hunter share a camp overnight and pass the time swapping the aforementioned tales, you know that things are gonna get just a tad... well, grim. Not a lot of gore, but there doesn't need to be.
The humor is pitch black and the acting is way above average than what you would expect.
You'd probably like it... IF you could even find it, that is. Only on VHS and maybe laserdisc -- as good as this was, it was the director's only feature film. And even MORE obscure than this, is a supposed sequel, also with Dourif, but made by others called GRIM PRAIRIE TALES II: RESCUE PARTY, of which there's no info on, other than it was made in the late 1990's


And even more obscure than that is EYES OF FIRE:




Made in the 80's, some may remember this popping up on video shelves in the late 80's - essentially a ghost story set in the late 1700's, when the country was just being settled by Europeans, involving an exiled minister and his followers who unknowingly decide to settle in a area where even the local natives avoid -- and we all know what that means...
EYES OF FIRE is atmospheric - translate that into slow-moving. But hell, it's not supposed to be POLTERGEIST - when was the last time you saw a horror film set in the 1700's that didn't feature Vincent Price and/or Christopher Lee? This was also shot in Missouri, which was surprising... and despite the 'atmospheric' quality, it has quite a few jumps that were very nasty to endure, watching this late at night by myself... again, something that's a nice change from the usual - IF, you can find it, of course. This did get a DVD release, but only overseas, it seems.

Consider the above, "public service"...

I'll try to find a few more gems before the month is up; but a very good Halloween countdown is a tv series: ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY.




One of the most unsettling title sequences ever on television... it announced that they meant to scare the shit out of you - and even though it looks pretty quaint today, they mainly succeeded.

NIGHT GALLERY is usually thought of being a failed TWILIGHT ZONE, which does both shows a disservice -- TZ did occasionally skirt into horror, but was more concerned with social commentary under the guise of science-fiction and fantasy; and although Serling did have plans for GALLERY to follow the same path, he didn't have full control of the show - the producer was Jack Laird, and the show is as much his as Serling's.

2 years of the show have been released to DVD, but to start out, you'll want to get the second season - that's the one with most of the shows that people remember... the Lovecraft adaptations ("Pickman's Model" and "Cool Air"), "The Caterpillar", "Green Fingers", and a lot more. It's also the show that had the "funny" little skits... which have their own "charm", I suppose. But, some 35-4o years later, you realize that they were among the first that set the stage for 'horror-comedy'; and NG was probably the last, great anthology show that managed to last longer than 2 years, and was a big influence on a lot of people working today.

Both seasons are available on DVD; the third year hasn't been released yet (but it was the weakest year) - you can also watch episodes on YouTube.


One does need to cleanse the palate after an intense lineup, so I chose to finally watch a British picture I've heard about for some time, but never had an opportunity to see until now - PSYCHOMANIA - available on Netflix, and other places.

What is it? Let the following clip enlighten you:

AFTER LAST SEASON on DVD


Your jaw will drop...

ANTICHRIST or PUNK'D AGAIN with Lars Von Trier

So I finally get to see this, after a couple of months of various discussion amongst critics and bloggers... scheduled to open in the U.S. in late October by IFC Films, and possibly shorn of its more outrageous imagery made me take matters into hand - not to mention that it might not make it anywhere near me that doesn't entail an hour's drive.
Let's just say that if you want to see this in the version that the Cannes audience saw, and not wait several months for discs to arrive in stores, opportunity is knocking.

First of all, it's not quite as lurid as the reviews have made it sound, although there's strong stuff here. Second, this is the most exciting thing in the world of film in ages... for some reason, only European directors seem to be able to deliver the goods (only Werner Herzog has stepped up and done TWO films to get people buzzed about film again); David Lynch was about the only recent American director to generate buzz this big.

ANTICHRIST is basically a combination of a Strindberg play with the aesthetics of Bergman and 'torture porn', whipped into frenzy with that touch of Von Trier (equal parts of wonder and contempt). I don't think that he's joking; but I do think that he did have some fun tweaking some of the conventions of the horror film -- and still making it way more disturbing than any recent 'straight horror' film.

Von Trier has trucked with horror before - if you've seen THE KINGDOM, then you know what he's capable of (and that was a miniseries for TV); and I'd even say that his second feature, EPIDEMIC, also fall under that heading (think of ADAPTATION done as a horror film). In both those instances, the horror coexists with a somewhat self-aware attitude - sort of 'What can I get away with?', prime example being the end of THE KINGDOM.

In ANTICHRIST, these moments are littered throughout the film, starting with the title and the opening prologue. But the big moment occurs roughly about an hour into the film, and one's reaction to it is the litmus test. At that point, you either ride it out to the end, or you abandon all hope, ye who have entered, to paraphrase a bit.

To call it 'horror' is rather unfair - it certainly doesn't fit comfortably within the confines of what most consider a horror film, though it does use the tropes of horror pretty well, and does manage to subvert several of them with a smirk (such as Willem Defoe being the Final Girl figure, as well as a whiff of his Jesus from LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST.) It's 'art-horror' which puts it in the same class as another Cannes shocker from earlier, Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION.

Get out to see this when you can (or seize on that opportunity knocking). You may like it or absolutely hate it... you won't be bored either way.