JACK-O

  

Fun Fact: Jack-O is one of the worst horror movies and best first ladies of all time. I am, of course, more inclined to write about the horror movie than the first lady, because I have seen the horror movie three times under various levels of intoxication. (And I have seen the first lady zero times under zero levels of intoxication. Man, this blog is getting weird.)

  

Anyway, Jack-O is an ultra-low-budget Pumpkinhead story from the early 90s. (There are no pill-box hats in sight.) I was planning to write up a blog post about this movie after I watched it last year, but I honestly could not think of anything clever or interesting to say about it, so I just let the memories fade into the back of my pumpkin head.

  

Today, when I was cleaning out my computer and looking at all my random saved photos (Hello, Eartha Kitt from Ernest Scared Stupid!), I came across the above picture. Now I honestly could not remember if this was a screen cap from Jack-O or an episode of Goosebumps. I believe it is actually from Goosebumps. But the fact that there was ever any doubt really says a lot about Jack-O. And basically, what it says is please do not watch Jack-O.

TITANIC II

STATS

Titanic II

2010

Directed by: Shane Van Dyke

Written by: Shane Van Dyke
Starring: Shane Van Dyke (notice a pattern?)

WHA’ HAPPENED?

It’s the hundredth anniversary of the Titanic’s fateful voyage, and some genius decided to give it another go. Some people are afraid it’s going to sink. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it does not.

Okay. Yes it does. It sinks real good.

…And they officially blew their budget.

Unlike the legitimate Titanic movie, this one doesn’t focus on a large cast of characters. Instead, the only characters we get to know are the ship’s one competent doctor and the boat’s owner. We also follow the rescue efforts of the girl’s father, who plays a Coast Guard captain/iceberg expert. (Uh oh.) It’s this guy:

You build ONE army of murderous rats and then

you’re stuck in straight-to-DVD sh!t like this. Life isn’t fair.

This film greatly improves on the 1997 film, because now, instead of an iceberg, we have an iceberg, a tsunami, and a MEGA-tsunami. You gotta love this film.

Quick, everybody. Lean slightly to the left. It’s a mega-tsunami.

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

Asylum Films has perfected the art of the “mockbuster,” releasing such exploitative classics as Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers: Fall of Man, and The Terminators.

They even improved on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by releasing a Sherlock Holmes that replaces Jude Law with dinosaurs and a giant squid.

This made my eyeballs hurt.

WHAT YOU SAY?

“An ice-glacier collapsed off the coast of Greenland.”

“The lifeboats are death traps!”

“Not again!”

“Looks like history’s repeated itself!”

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

None. Our lead actor Shane Van Dyke (who pulled an Orson Welles and wrote/directed this masterpiece) makes sure that the camera lingers on him lovingly, especially when he has his arms draped around the ladies… or when he’s slow-motion surfing.

Whose idea was it to start Titanic 2 with five minutes

of slow-motion surfing? Oh yeah, probably Shane Van Dyke.

BLOOD AND GUTS:

Thousands of people drown off-screen. One guy suffocates from smoke. And the lead character’s best friend gets crushed by the world’s worst emergency exit.

This happened to her to. Via a cabinet. She was pretty killable.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

I absolutely love the group shots. Notice the crowd of dozens who gather to watch Titanic 2 disappear into the horizon.

By some fluke of physics, most of these people are shown on the ship in later scenes.

Try to play Spot the Extra as this movie continues. One lady in particular is like Jason Voorhees: she’s everywhere at all times.

Watch her. Watch her good.

Speaking of extras, I swear I saw Debbie Gibson in the background of most of the group scenes.

Seriously, right? That's gotte be her.

Most of the film involves our two main characters trying to reach the ill-defined safety tanks at the bottom of the ship. This section of the movie seems more like Poseidon Adventure than Titanic (without the stars or awesomeness, of course).

Oh crap. The happy face is going to reach them in T minus 15 seconds.

Our hero (notice how I never learned her name) gets surprisingly good cell phone reception in an elevator… on a boat… in the middle of the ocean… a hundred feet below the surface.

OK. IS IT GAY?

This film is an interesting disaster, mostly because it shows how one man (writer/director/actor/caterer Shane Van Dyke) builds a whole movie around himself. It’s a huge ego project, all the way down to the movie’s climax, in which our main characters gather around his lifeless body and try to bring him back. He spends so much time on himself, that we have no idea how many innocent people died because of him. (Remember, his character built the boat.) In fact, at one point he looks out at the horizon and another character asks him, “Admiring your masterpiece?” That moment almost seemed like a comment on his own hubris.

Perhaps because of this, the film doesn’t bother to develop any of the other characters. There is no romance, no drama, no real emotions at all except for a father/daughter relationship that doesn’t go anywhere. Perhaps worst of all, Titanic 2 isn’t even that campy.  I have no reason to recommend this to a gay audience. It’s a Tara Reid.

I DISMEMBER MAMA

Welcome to VHS Tuesday, where I dig up one of my old, awful horror videos and share its delightfully stupid packaging. When horror videos first started flooding the market, the marketing geniuses really went to town thinking up the best taglines and the most hilariously literal summaries. Today we have I Dismember Mama, an awful, awful video nasty that I never want to see again. But its packaging: pure genius.
   

This is the cover. Look! It’s Roy Scheider playing a washed-up magician.

   

   
Note the tagline: May she rest… in pieces. Damn. Gets me every time.
     
And the summary:
        

POOR ALBERT IS JUST CRAZY ABOUT WOMEN.

     

Albert (Zooey Hall) is a mentally disturbed young man incarcerated in a rest home run by Dr. Burton (Frank Whiteman).

    
A nurse’s reprimand (Elaine Partnow) causes him to lock her in his room, strip off her clothes and attempt to murder her. Then an attendant (James Tartan) is brutally murdered and Albert escapes. And so starts a killing spree more brutal than any ever seen in the annals of filmmaking. First his mothers servant goes, then a call girl in a series of chilling murders culminating in a terrifying Hitchcockian climax that will leave you breathless time and time again!
      

Not only do we know exactly who dies (and in what order!) but we also know that this is the most brutal, Hitchcockian story ever put to film. God bless whatever minimum wage copy-writer wrote this description. You almost make me want to see this movie again. Almost.

WARLOCK III

       

WHA’ HAPPENED?

The WARLOCK is back, and this time hes played by some random guy who isn’t Julian Sands. He lures a bunch of lusty college students to an old house and kills them off. The only girl who stands a chance is Kirsty from Hellraiser, because seriously, she survived Pinhead and this guy is just some Eurotrash poser.

   

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

Coming a decade-plus after the original and its surprisingly enjoyable sequel, this installment always seemed to have that late-90s, early-2000s horror vibe: a little younger, a little sexier, a little more Scream-inspired. At least, that’s what the cover reminded me of. A demon-shadow (one of the all-time great horror posters) has been replaced by a bunch of pretty young people looking blankly at us.

    

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

Yup. There was basically nothing in the first two movies to satisfy the T and A quotient, but this one has that in spades. Basically, that main girl can have sexual chemistry with a toaster. She really brought it for this movie, especially considering how haunted she has to behave and how lame her family-drama-backstory truly is.
           

                         

BLOOD AND GUTS:

Yeah, but the director made the regrettable decision of ratcheting up the tension by cutting everything like a music video, complete with random flashes of light. It’s a horror movie aesthetic that has thankfully died down a little in the last few years, but holy crap is it intrusive.

          

PLOT HOLES AND CRAZINESS:

Something about a doll and a magic knife. Fun fact: I pretty much ignored the attempts at story here. Everything just felt a little low-rent for me, and not in an awesome look-it’s-a-warlock-adjusting-to-life-in-the-80s kind of way.

           

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

Whatever happened to Julian Sands? And does he still keep Sherrilyn Fenn in a box?

VALENTINE

Valentine's Day just happened, and you know what that means, ladies and gentlemen. I'm still in a Reese's-induced sugar coma. It also means that I get the chance to talk about one of my least favorite guilty pleasures, the Denise-Richards-getting-harpooned-to-death slashfest Valentine.

Now, full disclosure: I have a soft spot in my heart for this movie, and there are two reasons why: First, it is the only Katherine Heigl movie that I can bother sitting through all the way (besides Bride of Chucky or Wish upon a Star). I enjoy the fact that she gets murdered at the very beginning. Such is my hatred for Katherine Heigl.

And secondly, it was a date movie for me. One of my first. I was in junior high; I was really nervous. It didn’t go well. But… I look back on that memory fondly. And ironically.

Aside from that, Valentine doesn’t have a lot to recommend. It came at the tail end of the late-90s slasher resurgence, and it comes across as stale and perfunctory. The final revelation is really dumb. And the acting (except for dead-eyed superbitch Denise Richards) is subpar. It’s not campy enough to be enjoyable, nor legit enough to be watchable. It’s just sort of there, limping along through wildly implausible death scenes at multi-media art installations and dimly lit mansions. Even David Boreanaz is weirdly charisma-free (and I don’t mean Carpenter).

But considering all that, I still would recommend it. It’s like a time capsule. It’s a quaint little window into the horror trends at the turn of the millennium. It’s basically the perfect distillation of everything that was wrong with horror movies at that time. The bad plotting, the hyper-verbal yet completely unnatural dialog, the long scenes of exposition, the dozens of unnecessary red herrings. Watch this and you’ll remember what it was like in the late-90s, early-2000s. For some people, that’s reason enough to sit through this dreck.

If you don’t, this lady will cut you.

G'Bye!

I believe this is the end of the line for LGBTerror. Thanks for all the memories! I'll leave you with a very special goodbye video.

The Visit

 

Wait. This is a "Nigerian romantic comedy thriller." First of all, I don't know what that means. Secondly, this can't be the right film.

      

That's more like it.

STATS:

The Visit
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan (Yay!)
Written by M. Night Shyamalan (Sigh.)

WHA’ HAPPENED?

Two precocious kids spend a week with their estranged grandparents. They'd never met the old couple before, which makes things particularly unnerving when the grandparents start acting very strangely. There's poop and vomit involved, as well as the tensest game of Yahtzee ever committed to film. I did not make any of that up.

WHAT YOU SAY?

I'm not going to include any quotes here, because I think the dialogue was a little overwritten. But the young boy does rap a lot. Freestyle. It's cute.

Oh, wait. I'll include one quote: "YAHTZEE!"

Seriously. You gotta see this movie. 

 

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

Okay. We all know that found footage horror films are well past their sell-by date. After the first Paranormal Activity came out, people went crazy. After the last Paranormal Activity came out, people went... nowhere. At least not to the theaters, anyway. The bloom is off the rose, is what I'm saying.

But leave it to good ol' M. Night to shake things up a bit. After a long and embarrassing dry spell, he's figured out how to breathe new life into this dying subgenre. In this film, the main girl is an aspiring filmmaker who has clear emotional reasons to continue making her movie, which only heightens the weirdness when her footage starts revealing the creepy side of her family.

BLOOD AND GUTS:

The violence doesn't erupt until the very end, and the worst of it is only shown in quick flashes. Instead, this movie gets its chills from showing a seemingly normal elderly couple doing increasing weird and dangerous stuff. Also, there's a lot of poop involved. That's pretty gross.

PLOT HOLES AND CRAZINESS:

M. Night's best decision when writing this movie is to go against his tendency to attach a twist ending to everything he does. Instead, he reveals the true nature of the situation at the end of Act II, which makes the whole movie seem less cheap than, say, The Village. It also allows him to really go ape shit during the third act. 

Seven eights of this film is good.

  

OK. IS IT GAY?

Nope. There is absolutely nothing queer about it. On a scale of 1 to Freddy's Revenge, this movie's a 1. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go see it. You absolutely should. I mean...

"YAHTZEE!!!!!!!!"

Top 5 Christmas Scrooges

Late December. The days get shorter, the nights get colder, and people start knocking on your door so they can sing at you. 'Tis the season for drinking eggnog, wearing ugly sweaters, and watching people be horribly, disgustingly mean to each other. We all deserve a little coal in our stockings every once in a while, but some people take the naughty list to a whole new level. This week, we're counting down the top five movie Scrooges, those heartless holiday-haters who make life miserable for everyone else, and then never learn their lesson!

Number five: Mrs. Deagle, Gremlins
Any elderly woman who threatens to murder a cute, little puppy dog is bound to get some holiday comeuppance. And that's exactly what happens to Mrs. Deagle, when the titular monsters sneak into her house and rewire her electric chair into a death trap. Will anyone mourn her passing, though? Not likely. Mrs. Deagle is a prime example of a movie Scrooge.

She shuts down local businesses, cuts in line, throws buckets of cold water onto Christmas carolers, kicks innocent families out on the street, and threatens to kill that aforementioned dog with household appliances. The only time she ever shows kindness is when she's talking to her dozen-or-so cats. Perhaps it's best that she died before seeing her beloved felines turn into Gremlin food.

Number four: Uncle Frank, Home Alone
Every family has an Uncle Frank, the relative that always shows up for family gatherings, eats the food, and says cranky and inappropriate things to virtually everyone else. Sure, he doesn't do anything evil, but he's just not pleasant. And because the movie is from young Kevin McCallister's perspective, everything is amplified.

Still, any non-family member would recognize Frank as the Scrooge of the family. He refuses to pay for the pizza, he blatantly ignores his wife, and he calls Kevin a little jerk. Plus, in a rare deleted scene, he even pulls down Kevin's pants as some sort of prank. "Look what you did, you little jerk" indeed.

Number three: The Mouse Queen, The Nutcracker Prince
The only thing worse that an ugly old mouse is an ugly old mouse with the voice of Phyllis Diller who can curse you with ugliness if she ever bites your big toe. Not surprisingly, this character and the ugly-toe curse were not part of Tchaikovsky ballet, but were added to the animated movie version.

The Mouse King might be the main villain, but his angry old mother was the true Scrooge of the story, busting out weirdly specific curses and crawling through delicious-looking food like she was auditioning for Ratatouille. She was the one who turned some innocent boy into a nutcracker, all because... Well, her motivations don't quite make sense. And isn't that the Scroogiest thing of all?

Number two: The Penguin, Batman Returns
Superhero movies aren't typically Christmas-y. The flashing lights and tinsel tend to distract from the action scenes and the tight tights. Leave it to Tim Burton, then, to make the darkest, creepiest, most Christmas-y superhero movie of the 90s.

It's late December in Gotham City, and guess who's not feeling the holiday warmth: That's right. The deformed circus freak living in the sewers under the city. And can you blame him? It isn't his fault that his parents abandoned him into the sewers because he had six total fingers and the face of Danny DeVito. It is his fault, however, that he kidnaps half of the city's children and unleashes a troupe of evil circus performers on the street. That might be a little much. By the time he starts shooting his own minions with umbrella guns, it's pretty clear: The Penguin is a grade-A Scrooge.

Number one: Killer Santa, Rare Exports, Santa's Slay, Christmas Evil, and Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 and 2 
It may come as a surprise that there are so many killer Santa movies out there, but if you think about it for a second, it makes perfect sense. Santa sneaks into your house with the sole purpose of rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. Swap the red and white clothes for a blue jumpsuit and you basically have Michael Myers.

In some versions of this story--Rare Exports and Santa's Slay--jolly old Saint Nick is an ancient being with the murderous drive to dispense old world punishment on new world victims. In all the other versions, Santa is really just a crazy person in a suit, dealing with inner demons and past trauma by dressing up and murdering. In most of pop culture, Santa is such a jolly old fellow, that when he snaps and stabs someone with a candy cane, that makes him the biggest Scrooge of all.

So the next time you feel a little cranky this December, try to learn from these cautionary tales. Don't be a Scrooge. Or at the very least, don't threaten someone's puppy dog. You know that's not going to end well.

POCAHONTAS

Pocahontas (1995)

        

      

Horror connections:
John Kassir (The Cryptkeeper!)
Christian Bale (American Psycho)
Billy Connolly (Fido)
          

Gay connections:

Out voice actor David Ogden Stiers continues his partnership with Disney by voicing two new characters, Governor Ratcliffe and his manservant Wiggins. Hmm.
            

Bambi’s Mother Alert:

Unfortunately, no traumatizing on-screen deaths. Christian Bale accidentally shoots some guy, who topples in slow motion. Mel Gibson almost gets his head bashed in by a chief stick. (Pocahontas rescues him, of course. If she hadn’t, they probably wouldn’t have made this film.)
          

Coded gays:

Ratcliffe and Wiggins
       

Gay or British?

           

Ratcliffe and Wiggins have an interesting master/servant relationship. They both fawn over their overly pampered pug Percy. They bicker. Wiggins spends most of his manic energy trying to please Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe is overly fussy when it comes to appearances and fashion. (Admittedly, he sings about “the ladies of court,” but he seems more concerned with impressing everybody than getting laid.) This pairing has a definite “married couple” vibe, much like the Jumba and Pleakley duo from Lilo and Stitch (one half of which was also voiced by Stiers). It's stereotypical and jarring, but doesn't get a lot of screentime.

    

And this is their dog, Percy. It’s a pit bull.

                 

Bottom Line:

Does this film deliver on genuine suspense and horror? No. Does it include gay characters of interest and depth? Not exactly. What it does deliver are songs drowning in political correctness and two coded gays that function as comedy relief/plot forwarders.

           

But the characters do have nice hair.

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB

               
BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB

As a semi-serious fan of old school Hammer, I thought I'd seen all of their Mummy movies. Never my favorite franchise, but always better than average, the Hammer Mummy films were chock-full of half-naked Egyptians and a fair amount of suspense.

So it came as a complete surprise to me when I saw this movie, and the titular "mummy" ended up being a beautiful devil-woman with a severed hand. Yeah, apparently I'd never seen this one, because that didn't seem familiar at all. And it's a good thing, too, because it would've probably scared me away from the earlier, better films. Case-in-point: within the first five minutes, there's a sandstorm that somehow has the magical ability to slash people's throats. Why not!

Anyway, my viewing experience included a lot of getting up and down and pausing for bathroom breaks. A lot. So I don't feel comfortable writing anything lengthy about this film. I will say, though, that this is not one of Hammer's top-tier efforts. But at least they had enough money for their crawling-artificial-hand budget.

MONSTER HOUSE

         

MONSTER HOUSE

2006

        

The Polar Express is creepy. Like, waaaay creepy. It's the only movie that has ever been able to make Tom Hanks come across as a dead-eyed homeless pedophile (and I've seen Turner and Hooch). There are so many things wrong with the character design of that movie, and it all boils down to a technology that just wasn't quite ready to create humans.

          

I won't go on and on about the uncanny valley and whatnot, because those who've seen The Polar Express know what I mean. Everything looks almost normal, but there's just something really really wrong with the motion capture animation, so much so that not even a Hanksian tidal wave of charm can compensate for those dead, dead eyes.

      

So when Monster House reared it ugly head, complete with Robert Zemeckis as an executive producer and Image Movers as the production studio, I was not at all interested. I love animated movies, traditional and computer, but this wasn't either. It was something else. And I thought it would be ugly.
            
So years passed and I forgot about this movie. Beowulf came and went. Mars Needs Moms crashed and burned. And then a funny thing happened. I got really into Community, the NBC sitcom that has breathed new life into a dying television network. Community is currently my favorite show on television, and it's created by the inimitable Dan Harmon. The man's a genius, but from all accounts he's not the easiest guy to work with. (He's the only showrunner I've heard of to get kicked off of TWO shows that he co-created. Or something. I try not to follow Twitter nonsense.)
                 
Anyway, Dan Harmon co-wrote Monster House, so that fun tidbit immediately piqued my interest. Would this little cartoon be as witty and meta as Community? Would its script outweight any motion capture creepiness? I had to find out.
                   

                         
So when I sat down to watch this movie, I was all prepared to focus in on the jokes and dialogue and plotting, which, admitted, were all pretty great. (There's a killer uvula joke about halfway through.) Most of the dialogue really lands, and the characters are never less-than-genuine. It's a fun, heartfelt movie.
               
But what I really took away from this viewing experience is that the animation works! Motion capture works! The characters are all cartoony enough that it doesn't come across as dead-faced robots and Heidi Klums lurching through the film. Like any good cartoon, these characters are like real people, except not. This one movie singlehandedly reignited my faith in motion capture technology.
                       
Not only that, it actually turned me into a fan. I'd never seen so many beautiful, soaring camera angles on a cartoon before. The entire film is kinetic and cinematic and special. It really really soars. I don't know what this movie does differently from something like Beowulf and Polar Express. Maybe it comes down to having characters that don't try to look too human. Maybe it embraces the artificiality of the medium in a way that the others don't. Whatever it is, this is a gorgeous film. Who knew!
               

And that Chowder character.

That's basically every kid's first best friend.