31 Days of Horror in October!!!

 Credit where it's due: The Other Side Blog has this idea first! I did this ages ago but its been a while. Over the weekend at the Morgue & Krypt Horror Convention in my local neighborhood I got a chance to load up on weird old movies from the Vinegar Syndrome booth, something I've been obsessed with for the last couple years now. 

For my 31 days I'm going to do a mix....some horror films, some horror games and some horror books. A well rounded experience! Also a chance to talk about some of what I've been reading, watching and playing....and kick myself back into a better writing habit (I've fallen off the deep end on my writing consistency this year). 

Return of the Horror Film Reviews: Stranded (2013)

Stranded (2013)

It's sometime in the not-too-distant future and four astronauts on the Moon Base Ark are about to have a very bad day after a rogue meteor shower pellets their base, seeding it with alien spores. The spores rapidly manage to infect some of the crew, leading to possible hallucinations and madness. Are the crew just imagining things, or are they really experiencing a seriously low budget film with aspirations to produce an alien that somehow manages to blend multiple other horror films' aliens together into a sort of spore puree?

The film is largely forgettable, at least partially because it takes itself rather seriously but misses some very important steps along the way to "getting to the good parts" which aren't really all that great so I don't know what their hurry was. Among other things it failed to take time to establish any personality for the four main characters beyond "scared, yelling, and in constant state of emergency," so we never learn much of anything about them that helps to sympathize with their plight or at least feel for them. In their defense the actors really did have "freaking out in middle of space emergency" down perfectly, though.

Unlike virtually every other movie these days Stranded actually uses old fashioned FX and never once soils itself with lame CGI. This has the distinct advantage of making the movie a bit cheesy in an old fashioned way, but it also makes the movie feel a bit more genuine and distinguished from its similar low-budget competition. The gore FX in the movie are not bad, even if we only really get to see something truly alien in the last five seconds of the film. This reliance on classic FX almost makes up for the painfully basic recycled set pieces and props. The film's sets are so generic and recycled that you will spend a lot of time trying to figure out which other film they filched the set pieces from. Some items (I'm looking at you, booklight-turned-space-radio) are so blatant that it takes you out of the movie every time you see the piece in action.

Most startling of all the special effects is the moon base exterior, a lovingly detailed scale model crafted with all the precision and accuracy of a model train set piece. All of the exterior shots, from meteor showers to landing (and taking off) ships are done using this set piece which clearly was someone's special project of love. I would not at all be surprised if the moon base set wasn't finished first, and the story pitched to make use of it.

When all is said and done this movie had about 20 minutes in the middle where it actually got really interesting, and I started to take notice....but then it degenerated back into more derivative silliness again. Unfortunately Stranded was trying too hard to be too many other films, and the really interesting bits don't get enough attention in the film's effort to borrow from other better ventures before it. If the movie had spent more time on the core conceit (spore-alien seeks to mimic host organisms while hosts think they are hallucinating) and also spent more time setting up these characters as people we could relate to (or at least feel for), then it would have done better.

Stranded answers many important questions that I never knew needed answering. Some of the questions this film tackles include:

What has Christian Slater been up to, lately? Making this movie, for one!

Did you know those little pop-out book lights they used to sell all over the place a decade ago can double as space communicators if you paint them black?

One of the great mysteries of a film like Alien is just what the alien is (bioweapon or perfect hunter?) but it turns out that alien spores are quite capable of hijacking a host and getting her to give birth to an alien doppelganger in a matter of hours because reasons.

Also, motorcycle helmets with vacuum tubing make good spacesuit helmets. And firefighter breathers make good moon breathers, too.

Worst case of "explosive decompression into a vacuum doesn't actually do that to the human body" ever. Like: pureed exploding body bad.

Another fine example of "gravity and weightlessness in films are portrayed accurately in inverse proportion to the film's budget."

All in all a fun little romp if you catch it for free on Netflix like I did, but utterly forgettable otherwise. I give this one a C+ but might have been tempted to give it a B- if I didn't wince every time I saw Christian Slater speaking into my old booklight.

actual appearance of alien may vary

Return of the Horror Film Reviews: Mortuary (2005)

First, just wanted to mention that I started typing this on my new Galaxy Tab S4 10.1 inch tablet, which so far is proving to be a worthwhile investment. The Logitech Bluetooth keyboard/cover combo is rather nice, albeit a bit small....but beyond that it's pretty serviceable, if not as cool as the Surface's flexible keyboard. Unfortunately every five seconds or so Blogger would try to update and when it did the cursor would decouple from the typing area, so now I'm back on the old desktop. But enough of that!

Mortuary (2005)

Mortuary is a 2005 horror film with the name Tobe Hooper prominently displayed as director. The opening premise is simple but rife with weird promise. The film opens on a family of three, a mom, her odd daughter and snarky teenage son (played by Dan Byrd who steals much of the show) as they set off to start a new life in the wake of their father's death. As it turns out, for reasons never quite established the mom is keen to start a career as a mortician (or maybe resume one?) and she has invested in an abandoned cemetary/mortuary combo in some small back-assward California town. The place is a shambles, a relic of a complex ripe for horror films. The guy selling it to her is a bit crazy, one gets the impression....or just happy to have a sucker to take over the operation. A normal person would have called her in on child abuse for subjecting her kids to the place.

But hey! This is what good B movie horror films are made of. Everyone gets along, the teenage son starts off making local acquaintances, including the gratuitous punk bully and his two uncharacteristically slutty small town girlfriends, while mom sets about cleaning the place up just in time for the bodies to start rolling in. The pace of the movie is rapid and we quickly establish a range of quirky local denizens at the local diner where the teen son takes a job, even as some odd sightings are made at the graveyard.

When the mom delves into the graveyard and stumbles across a tomb with the nigh infamous Lovecraft "...even death may die" quote, verbatim, chiseled in stone I decided that this movie was going to be fun if nothing else. As it progresses along we discover that there is a lingering evil in the place, a story about a made couple who used to run the mortuary and had a deformed son that they kept locked away, until one day he escaped and murdered them, and all the while strange black ooze creeps out and snacks on blood spilt by the mom, who thankfully is working only with dead bodies because she would never get a medical license, let me tell ya....

In surprisingly quick order the movie escalates from "could a creepy deformed madman be lurking in the caverns below the cemetery?" to full-on Reanimator-style zombie invasion, and the similarities are just significant enough to suggest that the people behind this movie really liked those earlier films. It maintains a camp quality to the entire experience, much as most 80's style horror films did, playing it all straight while still throwing just about every gory bit they can at the screen. The bulk of the FX is makeup, but the blood monster is CGI (a sort of unholy love child of a shoggoth, the sarlac and the Black Oil virus from X-Files).

This movie includes:

1. Vile house just waiting for victims

2. The Lovecraft moment (a quote from The Nameless City carved on a tomb)

3. Smart, fast possessed undead who become a terrifying inversion of what they obsessed about in life

4. Granted honorable mention for the "Linnea Quigley Cemetery Chick" Award (but no actual nudity)

5. Manages to get both the hillbilly mutant, shoggoth-thing and reanimated dead in all at once

6. Gratuitous disrespect for the dead....even BEFORE they get up and start chasing the living!

When we get to the end of the ride (and it's definitely a ride) the only question is just how the monsters will manage to eat everyone at the end....and we know they will. But it's a very fun ride along the way, with a shade of Movie Lovecraft* permeating the experience. If Jeffrey Combs had shown up at the end with a giant juicer I would have been not at all surprised. A solid B+++!!!

*You know what I mean: Lovecraft through the lens of Stuart Gordon