Dear Future-Mike,
I am writing this on September 18th, 2020 just after I found out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead. For the first time, I am considering giving up and letting hopelessness take over. I keep thinking of a social media post about trauma survivors who watch the same movies and shows over and over. It is because they find comfort in the familiarity of the experience. Revisiting favorite shows and movies is a powerful antidote against the unpredictability of life. Pattern recognition for humans, where we examine the data, looking for the reassurances that we will survive the present.
Future-Mike, I cannot even begin to imagine what fresh hells have manifested in your world during the few short weeks between my writing this and your reading it. How much closer is the armed insurgency? Are we still the world leader in preventable COVID-19 deaths? I hope the worst days will be behind us and life has become less hostile and frightening in the interim. But if not...
Love,
Past-Mike from the good old days of mid-September.
This week's Shocktoberfest is the usual mixed bag of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar movies. I hardly ever watch sequels but I could not pass up the return of Samara Weaving's unique brand of Satanism from 2017's The Babysitter. Lets get right to it.
16) The Fury (1978) Classic Brian De Palma out-of-control-teenagers-with-psychic-abilities coupled with a healthy dose of paranoid, top-secret, evil government agencies. DePalma does a pretty good job balancing the two genres to present a complex story with complex characters. Kirk Douglas may have been a little beyond his prime to parade around shirtless, but John Cassavetes' performance is explosive.
17) The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020) First Time Watch! I'm going to have to classify this as a movie that I really wanted to enjoy, but did not. A remake more than a sequel, it was not that interesting. They even brought back the same characters to kill again! Plus, now that the world has fallen in love with Samara Weaving, does that mean she can't be the supreme bitch anymore? The unexpected sentimental ending was the real knee to the groin for what was an average teen gross out horror comedy. Despite McG's usual flashy visual style, The Killer Queen's greatest victim was this itself.
18) Innocent Blood (1992) First Time Watch! A vampire/gangster movie with future Sopranos hoodlums, Paulie Walnuts and Richie Aprile? Plus Don Rickles and the La Femme Nikita actress? With so much good stuff in this movie, it is easy to see how the maxim "too much of a good thing is still too much" is easy to ignore when you are high on cocaine. Great action scenes, special effects and some (largely superfluous) nudity kind of kept me engaged.
19) Bay of Blood (1971) Upon watching this movie at its premiere, Christopher Lee, a well know person in the horror community, spoke about feeling revolted at the high level of violence in this film. He and director Mario Bava had made the sublime The Whip and the Body previously. This interesting contrast between the more restrained, elegant horror of the past and the brutal terrors of modern life that so upset Lee would be revisited the following year with Hammer's Dracula A.D. 1972. Lee's count, resurrected into modern, swinging London, never once leaves the ruined, gothic cathedral he was reborn in, almost as if he too were revolted by the horrid world he was called to. Still, Bava's florid visual style prevails over the mayhem (13 gruesome, yet stylish deaths) and almost completely baffling plot.
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| This year's Mario Bava GIF |
20) Ghost Stories (2020) First time watch! My first anthology of this year hails from India. Of the four episodes, the first was very good, and the second was pretty good. The final two failed to keep my attention.
21) Cult Girls (2019) First time watch! Ever watch a heavy metal video and think it would make a pretty good horror movie? Well, here it is. Aesthetically spell binding journey into religious horror via Black Metal sensibilities. At times, the small budget and obvious lack of acting experience among the players were hard to dismiss, but overall, a highly enjoyable experience.
22) Assignment Terror (1971) (aka Los Monstruos del Terror) First time watch! The third film featuring horror's most conflicted lycanthrope, Paul Naschy's Waldemar Daninsky, has one of the most audaciously wild plots: a race of aliens seeks to remove humanity from Earth via monsters from the Universal Classic Horrors movies of the 1930s. A vampire, a werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, and a mummy are united to purge humanity for the alien, colonial exploiters. Michael Rennie, from The Day the Earth Stood Still, is back as another alien from space with a (different) message for humanity. Bond-Girl Karin Dor inhabits a reanimated corpse with lust for life that borders on necrophilia.
23) Lord Shango (1975) First time watch! I found this Blaxploitation gem on Amazon Prime! Director Ray Marsh and writer Paul Carter Harrison created a fascinating glimpse into the world of rural African Americans in the 1970s where the conflict between Christianity, the religion of the slave owners, and Yoruba, the religion brought with from Africa, erupt. The shocking opening starts at a beautiful, riverside baptism. Soon, the praising and hymn singing is disrupted by Femi (Bill Overton), a Yoruba practitioner. His attempt to prevent his lover Billie(Avis McCarther), from accepting Christ ends in his murder by the deacons. But instead of veering into revenge movie like Sugar Hill, Lord Shango concentrates on reconciliations as Billie and her mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), struggle to move forward. At times the mysticism gets a little to ethereal, but all the leads deliver powerful performances and the film ends on strong and beautiful redemptive note.
24) 12-Hour Shift (2020) First time watch! This totally unhinged, gruesome comedy of errors was my final Fantasia Festival choice. I finally got to watch it and oh wow! Watch this space for further developments.
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| David Arquette in 12-HOUR SHIFT, a Magnet release. © Matt Glass. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing. |
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