Thirty One Days of Horror: Terror Within

Day Twenty-One: Terror Within

"My god, it's full of tropes..."

Here's the sort of movie I subscribe to Netflix for: some obscure, otherwise forgotten post-apocalyptic survival horror flick that I otherwise missed back in 1988 (and would probably have liked less then, anyway) just waiting for me to discover it for the first time. Like Leviathan that I reviewed earlier its a product of the 80's, and shows it. Unlike Leviathan, this movie was done on what looks like a shoestring budget and where Leviathan attempts for a fancy rip-off of The Thing and Alien, Terror Within aims instead to be the unholy love child of Alien and C.H.U.D.!

Since this movie is not high on my list of "amazing films" be warned that copious spoilers lie ahead!

Our tale opens in the Mojave desert, some undetermined time after a biological agent has decimated the world population and mutated the unlucky ones into hideous mutants referred to as gargoyles. Luckily the surviving employees at the Mojave Center for Disease Control subterranean labs (a complex no doubt built under contract by Umbrella Corp.) are boldly setting out to see what's left on the surface as their resources run low. Food type resources, that is. They seem to have all the hair care products and gel that they need....in the 80's, hair was always a priority. Always.

After the first two guys go missing with sound effects suggesting an untimely demise, two more agents are dispatched along with the adorable dog Butch to see what happened. They discover that the two previous agents are dead, as is a camp of survivors, much to their surprise. Then they stumble on a lone woman who lived through the massacre, it seems. They return with her to the base; she's the ray of hope that survival in the post-bioplague wasteland is possible!

What happens from here on out boils down to: "we wanted to do Alien, but we lacked the budget for a sci-fi blockbuster so we worked with what we had." The script, characters and even several situations are essentially pantomiming or otherwise ripping off Alien at every turn, but with that horribly cheesy eighties era TV-actor special style to it. They are so busy ripping of Alien, in fact, that they repeatedly miss opportunities to do their own thing and distinguish their film from the obvious source material, which is a shame.

No hair was harmed in the making of this film

The film plods along toward the inevitable conclusion, as they discover the survivor in the wastelands is pregnant, but the fetus seems to be growing at a rate of days instead of months. They decide to operate and remove the fetus, but it's too late and the little monster escapes. As you may expect the only thing more impressive than its two day gestation period is it's enormously efficient metabolism and the baby gargoyle mutant is a large, lumbering rubber suit adult in a matter of hours.

The group makes improvised weapons, including a flamethrower, crossbow and some lasers that look suspiciously like either nail guns or some pvc tubing and the hunt is on! If you've seen Alien you've already seen how this movie goes, except much, much better and with more thought put into it. If you still want to know, read on.

Long story short, the mutant wants women, and it grabs one of the CDC employees and has its way with her. The crew dies slowly but surely while trying to kill it, and eventually we're down to two survivors (a Hasselhoff wanna be and the good lady doctor) plus the rascally dog Butch. Butch is the real star of the movie here, and even when he gets in a tangle with the mutant he lives. Butch is a horrible dog actor, but he makes up for it by being adorable.

Eventually the two final survivors (note that I feel no compulsion to restart this movie just to remember what their names are) have a final confrontation with the mutant and manage to grind it up in a large fan blade. Then another base finally contacts them and they feel a ray of hope. We end with the trio leaving, blowing up the installation and a couple more rubber suit mutants up behind them.

Some of the more amusing moments in Terror Within include:

1. Bad Dog acting. Butch the dog is not terribly good at what he does, but he makes up for it by being so cute. Butch is to Mojave CDC Lab what Jones was to the Nostromo.

2. This is an underground lab, right? I guess it's secret because its entrance is an old prospector's shack in the middle of the desert, with no visible roads or means of reaching it. The lab itself is ambiguously large...which is to say, as large as the plot demands for it.

3. I liked we have two goofy tech/mechanic types, who precisely match the same roles of the two mechanics on the Nostromo. I like how one dies while dropping his cigarette in an eerily similar scene to the same event in Alien.

4. The mutant gargoyles in this movie suffer from the age-old rubber monster problem of "jaws and teeth too large and unwieldly to live with." How the hell do you eat, let alone bite, with a jaw like this thing has?

5. We don't need no stinkin' metaphors! This movie avoided the "alien as a metaphor for rape, sexual invasion, and pregnancy" and simply made it exactly that, with the mutants seeking to impregnate normal women with their infernal fast-growing spawn.

6. Aside from all that, this movie was shot in locations that look very much like where I grew up as a youth, so there was a pleasant sort of home-iness to it for me.

7. This film is filled with a delightful load of retrotech. There's even a spot where splicing a tape becomes a tension-filled moment! Yay for the retrofuture as envisioned by the past.

8. "What do we do now that we've killed it?" "I know! Let's leave our underground base, where the only technology that can broadcast a subsonic noise to drive the monsters away exists, and blow it all up because SCIENCE, bitches."

Seriously, I have no idea why they thought blowing up their base at the end was a good idea, other than because the Nostromo blew up so there ya' go.

Terror Within aspires to be Alien but with no budget, poor acting, an ill-conceived script, and styled hair that is far too good to be true in the post-apocalyptic landscape. Plus, this movie came out after other, better films like Predator and The Thing so it had no excuse. Still, it was fun to watch and might be even more entertaining with friends who like to rip bad movies apart. I'll give it a solid D, with the caveat that I still found it enjoyable to watch, for a groan-fest of fun. But Butch the dog gets a B+, for being the best and cutest actor in the movie!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Midnight Movie

Day Twenty: Midnight Movie

I have a real thing for the idea of haunted films. There are a few good books out there that touch on the idea (or run full tilt with it) including Joe Lansdale's Drive-In trilogy and Greg Kihn's Horror Show, which I read on a stormy night in Long Beach, Washington and it scared the jezeesus out of me, which is a testament to its quality if ever there was! There's also a decent compendium of short stories called Midnight Premiere, which was edited by Tom Piccirilli himself, so you know they're  good.

Midnight Movie falls into this vein, a tale about a haunted film. Specifically, its a haunted production of a late-60's horror movie, and the film's creator went mad and was locked away in an insane asylum. It's never entirely clear to me if the film itself was the cause of his madness, a byproduct of it, or representative of something else (i.e. he actually murdered the actors in the original film or something). The important thing is that a careless doctor decides to indulge the director with a viewing of the movie on Halloween night for some seriously medical-malpractice-worthy reason. This motivates the madman to break free of his bonds, bite his wrists open, and use the blood to invoke a spell that somehow either transposes his evil spirit into the film or brings his ghoulish serial killer to life. The net result is the same: an asylum full of dead people, evidence of an occult ritual, and a detective obsessed with the truth.

Cut to five years later and a local theater has a copy of the film it intends to play for a midnight showing on Halloween in a quiet little town. The usual cast of oddball teens and locals assemble for the late night viewing, to be treated to a schlocky black and white horror film about a skull-masked madman who uses a curious twisting corkscrew blade to gouge his victims to death. As the van full of carefree hippies in the movie are methodically murdered, things get weird as it is soon evident that the killer is somehow jumping from the film to reality and killing people in the real world, too. Panic ensues, and the body count mounts precipitously. No one, of course, is safe, even when the movie tempts you to think so.

Obligatory Spoiler Alert!

The movie carries on as most slasher flicks do, this one focused on its film-tethered supernatural ghoul who is relentless and unstoppable. The victims are surprisingly quick to accept the reality of their situation, and display a mild level of genre saviness, overwhelmed by the fact that they are all essentially caricatures destined for death, until toward the end a few survivors get the idea the monster is driven by its ability to sense fear. The girl Bridget (Rebekah Brandes) and her young brother Timmy (Justin Baric) both suffered serious abuse from their father and rely on their unfortunate conditioning to squelch their fear.....but to no avail, as they are ultimately dragged into the very film itself, where they discover all of the killer's victims in some sort of backwoods purgatory. In the end Bridget saves her brother when she realizes the credits are about to roll, but becomes trapped in the film as she does. The police at last arrive, and the film is confiscated as evidence, likely never to play again until the next low budget sequel, if there ever is one.

Midnight Movie is more slasher flick than anything else. It has the following notable features:

1. Ghoulish supernatural killer. He's ugly, he has a mask, and we never see his face. It's never clear if the ghoul is the actual incarnation of the film maker post-occult ritual or something else brought to unholy life.

2. Cabinverse* Friendly. It might be the "first" use of the artifact (thus the presence of the cop and therapist who come to watch the film of the madman that they never caught), but the scholar, the athlete, the whore and the virgin are all present (and then some) and everyone dies at the end, pretty much. The film reel is clearly the doom of choice. I would avoid seeing movies at that theater once every five years if I lived in the Cabinverse.

3. Slips into Hellraiser-style Purgatory. The last ten minutes switch the film from your usual supernatural slasher flick to something a bit more macabre and unusual, as it may indeed be the case that the ghoulish killer is trapped in his celluloid hell and he's pulling anyone he can into it. Shades of this special subgenre made popular by Hellraiser, Silent Hill and the Kult RPG.

4. Everyone is meant to die. The film does a decent job of occasionally lulling you into believing some characters are meant to be the tough survivors, and then Bam! they're full of chunky holes.

5. Riduculously Dumb Killer Weapon. Though unique...I guess....the hand-driven "screw knife" seems like the sort of weapon only a supernatural ghoul could figure out how to effectively use.

I'll give this one a C because while it had its moments, the film by and large felt a bit by-the-numbers and didn't grab me like I would have liked it to. The last ten minutes of the film were the best; it needed a lot more of that, I think.




*My term for films which neatly fit inside the metaplot/setting of Cabin in the Woods.

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Thirty One Days of Horror: Suck

Day Nineteen: Suck

Horror is pretty broad as genres go; you can fit a lot under the label, and have a lot of crossover with other genres at the same time. And then there are vampire films.

Most vampire films tend not to feel so much like horror films in any conventional sense; after a certain point (the post-Anne Rice, post White Wolf era of vampire tales) they shift from more conventional horror (Fright Night, Near Dark) into something else entirely. Films like the Interview with a Vampire series, Underworld and others I dare not invoke by name tend to revolve around vampires as protagonists or anti-heroes. There may be horror in these films, but it's often the horror instigated by the protagonist, or maybe horror at their own condition (if the film is done right....at least according to my sensibilities).

Then there's Suck. Suck was a 2009 release with some big names attached to it, including Malcom McDowell as Eddie van Helsing, Jessica Pare as the main protagonist (also named Jessica), Henry RRollins, Iggy Pop and even Alice Cooper appears as an evil vampiric bartender. With sort of lineup the film could cruise along and still manage to do well....luckily for us writer and director Rob Stefaniuk turns this movie into something genuinely awesome, at once hillariously campy and over the top with both comedy and horror.

The short version of the plot: Jessica and her band "The Winners" are trying to make it big with their music when during a visit to Montreal Jessica hooks up after the show with an admirer named Queeny....a genuinely creepy fellow who, naturally, is a vampire. The band thinks Jessica has ditched them so off they go to their next gig, until Jessica mysteriously shows up, looking a little....different. Her newfound undead magnetism woos the crowd and the band starts to get popular.



Before too long things spiral out of control. It looks like the secret to musical success lies in the charisma of undeath, and the band's escalating success, along with the unfortunate appetites of Jessica, send them down a one-way trip to vampiric mayhem. Amidst all this there are a few slight problems, not the least of which is Eddie van Helsing, descendant of the late van Helsing, vampire hunter, who is still carrying out the duties of his family legacy.

This movie has loads of cameos from rockstars, a fantastically weird take on the entire vampire subgenre, and pretty much every actor in the film provides a top-notch thoroughly hammed-up performance. Jessica Pare is awesome in her lead role, and she handles the slow, certain descent into vampiric hunger with perfection.



Five awesome bits about this movie:

1. Alice Cooper as the bartender and...well....let's just say he shows up in a truly fitting role at the very end.

2. The over-the-top performances, enhanced by the natural showmanship of vampirism, are entertainingly mesmerizing.

3. Iggy Pop as a sort of "vampire fixer?" Awesome.

4. Eddie van Helsing (McDowell) hams it up as the doddering old hunter.

5. Amazing soundtrack as good as its rock star lineup.

Suck is on my short list of A+ films. If you like to dabble in a good dose of horror and comedy on occasion, you must not miss this one!

Week in Gaming: Rift Storm Legion, Pathfinder, AD&D and Grimtooth

I've been coasting on my "Thirty One Days of Horror" reviews so I thought I'd inject a more mundane blog post into the middle of it all, just a bit of a "me" update, I suppose...!

Partially because I was ready for it, and partially because my wife budgeted for it and encouraged me, I've taken the one year sub Storm Legion plunge with Rift. Trion Worlds has this deal where you spend $120 and get one year of playtime, the forthcoming Storm Legin expansion pack, and a variety of preorder goodies (although not the deluxe edition goodies, those are a separate "upgrade," alas). After thinking about it I decided this was worthwhile. Rift appears to be firmly rooted in its subscription model with no plans (beyond levels 1-20) to switch to a a F2P model. I really dig the background, lore and look of the game. I love the soulshard profession/class mechanic, which lets you play some very different characters within the same range of classes. And while most of my Raptr tracking represent phantom hours (my wife started it recently by updating her hours played on different games and I followed suit to reflect the actual pre-Raptr hours of many of my favorites) the Raptr hours for Rift are 100% actual play.

This is another way of saying I've sunk a lot of time into getting my character up in level before the expansion (my main is almost level 39 as of today) and surprisingly I'm not feeling burnout or distaste at the experience, which is a good thing. In contrast I can't even look at a WoW screenshot without feeling stomach churning disgust anymore! But them, over the course of many years I sank a lot of time into WoW. Fractionally that of the hardcore, but way more than a typical casual player, I suspect. Maybe. Hard to tell anymore...people have really got some skewed ideas on work/life/game balance ratios these days.

In tabletop gaming news not much to say other than that I'm enjoying my weekly Pathfinder campaign, which is the first new Realms of Chirak campaign I've run in a while and is the first lengthy Pathfinder-powered Chirak campaign, period. It's got me inspired to return to and finish the Chirak Pathfinder edition, which may eventually see the light of day. I stalled on the text blocks; I've never been a fan of 3.X edition stat block design, as its tedious, time consuming and I lack the obsessive pedantry necessary to enjoy the requisite minutiae of detail that the stat blocks require. That said, I would like to finish this sucker and get it out in PoD, so maybe I'll devote more time to the task soon.



The Saturday game has been having problems for a while now. No sooner did I get a large group together for the new 1st edition AD&D campaign (set in a fresh tailor-made retro setting) than did the next group two weeks later see too many cancellations for the game to continue that week. When you're on a bi-weekly run like that, missing a week turns it into a monthly game, and monthly games have problems with consistency and coherence, in my experience. We'll see what happens next week.

I keep pushing for non-D&Desque gaming but I can never get enough bites or commitments. Is this just exemplary of the contracting hobby, or unique to my region? I'd be very keen to run some BRP or Call of Cthulhu...some Legend or RQ6....but I can't get enough regulars to commit. I know some of it is due to the economy of time and money; people have limited amounts of both, and most of my cohorts don't buy many games, and like playing the few they do own (which, as it turns out, is mostly just Pathfinder). But still....it never used to be this hard to get alternate games going.

Outside of that, I've cut back severely on my game purchases. I decided to stop throwing money down the same pit; there are too many D&D-likes out there now, and not enough new RPGs. If there are new RPGs, I'd rather look at them instead of buying yet another D&D-like that will absorb shelf space and get no playtime. Likewise, with 1st edition AD&D and soon 2nd edition AD&D back in print, its hard to justify buying new retroclones and offshoots when the Real Deal is available and in print. There are some exceptions, of course. Plus, although I've never owned it in print I keep thinking I should grab Labyrinth Lord. Blood & Treasure, too. ACKS (Adventurer, Conqueror, King System) has also looked interesting. But....when would I ever get a chance to play? My main group of players are all thoroughly hooked on Pathfinder, and my alt-interest players are keen for non-D&D, should it ever happen, as opposed to D&D-likes.

I did grab Grimtooth's Traps and Traps Fore recently from the FLGS, which was able to snag them for me from their distributor. Nice to have those two books again, both of which I used heavily and often back in the 80's. Michael von Glahn was the illustrator in Traps Fore....I wonder what happened to him? He was a great guy, and his illustrations were hillarious. He did a lot of work for my fanzines back then, and it made my publications look so much better for it. He also did the first commissioned map art for one of my campaign settings (Keepers of Lingusia). Still my favorite map.

 

Thirty One Days of Horror: 2012 Zombie Apocalypse

Day Eighteen: 2012 Zombie Apocalypse

When the SyFy logo popped up at the beginning of 2012: Zombie Apoclaypse I almost stopped Netflix to look for something else...luckily I struggled through the opening few minutes to discover what might be the most decent SyFy production I've seen. Who could have guessed?

This is a 2011 release (presumably first on the SyFy channel then direct to video) featuring yet another post-apocalyptic zombie tale. We zombie and post-apocalypse fans have been drinking from the fire hose for some time now, and this movie is yet another delectable drop. 2012: ZA stars Gary Weeks and Ving Rhames, much to my surprise; the rest are probably actors I'd recognize if I watched more made-for-TV films, but having a couple decent guys involved in the film adds a modest weight of authenticity to it that you wouldn't otherwise get with this sort of movie. Ving plays Henry and Gary plays Mack, and together they hold together a rag-tag team of survivors working their way westward to the promise of a safe zombie-free Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles.



The opening scenes in the film may seem off-putting at first, as a trio of survivors including Ramona (Taryn Manning) emerge from their safe hideout to investigate what has happened over the last six months. They quickly fall prey to zombies as they engage in a predictable series of very un-survivor-like behavior, but all is redeemed when the real survivors we're supposed to root for, led by Gary and Henry, show up and save Ramona and one of her buddies. They then tell them about the news of a safe island to the west, and their intent to get to it.

The movie focuses on the journey, the details of a group of survivors who are clearly inspired by the Left4Dead franchise, as they overcome various obstacles and deal with the rigor of surviving a hostile world gone straight to hell. It's a pretty good job, and even though it's a SyFy film with all the subpar-CGI you've come to expect from such fare, the bulk of the establishing shots, general editing and most of the apocalyptic scenery works really well. The zombie effects are not typically bad, but harken back to an older style of zombie, in which an occasional zombie is focused on in greater detail with better makeup, and most of the extras as bloodied up precisely as much as is needed to make them work in their mob scenes. I've seen worse, and there's nothing at all wrong with the film's presentation of its star monsters....although when a person goes through the change into a zombie, they do rely heavily on a rippling skin effect that, while unique, doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.



The other bad special effect comes at the end of the film with the obligatory boss fight. Spoilers ahead! The boss in this case are some zombified tigers which don't really work, suffering as they do from the modest and underpaid CGI talent of whatever FX studios produce this stuff for SyFy. That said, this movie is one of only a few zombie flicks that address the way animals are affected by the zombification process, so kudos to them for including such ideas in the first place.

Throughout the movie there are odd moments that bugged me. Survivors who are being portrayed as tough and smart folk occasionally do dumb things. For example:

1. When Henry and Cassie are on the rooftop, she doesn't close the door behind her. In fact, throughout the movie they frequently don't close doors or gates behind them despite the fact that its established that these zombies don't have the brains to open stuff up. My god, they didn't even close the gate behind them in the "Safe for Humans" compounds at the school they find. Why???

2. Why would Julien (Johnny Pacar) not think to open the porta-potty with caution? WHY???

3. I was unclear in the opening monologue explaining how things degenerated so quickly as to just why the govenment thought detonating EMPs over the continental US to black out electronics was a good way to contain zombies. This made no sense at all.

4. At one point when they meet up with the archers, it is stated that everyone should recover their arrows when they can. A minute later they plug three zombies with arrows that they then run right on by with no immediate hurry...and leave the arrows. Argh.



There are many little moments in this movie that are added purely for flavor and interesting detail, and I really liked that the time was taken to include these moments. The dog which followed the group early on, for example...or the space station/satellite/who-knows-what burning up in orbit. Julien's diary obsession, or Cassie's tale of her husband. Little details like this are important to a film which needs to carry on the weight of minor things. I also appreciated that the movie didn't take the easy route and follow other films with depictions of "man as the worst monster," focusing instead on the idea that here, in this apocalypse, the zombies make whatever is left of humanity all allies.

This movie tries hard to play it straight and tell a traditional survival horror tale. I think it succeeds, within its own limits, and in some ways exceeds expectations, especially for being a SyFy production. I may have to pay attention to more SyFy films in the future, as its possible there are some other rough hidden gems out there I haven't seen.

It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, and a better director with a bigger budget could have made this shine, but it's still a gem in the rough. I give it a solid B. Best kind!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Leviathan

Day Seventeen: Leviathan

A movie from 1989 that I've never seen before featuring Peter Weller? I wonder how many horror movies (or close enough) Peter Weller has starred in that I don't know about? Actually the big mystery of Leviathan is: how did I not see this movie in the theaters in 1989 when it came out? Seriously, in 1989 I was a freshman in college, with no job and I had exactly three things (aside from college) occupying my time: RPGs, women and movies. Admittedly that was the year Batman  came out, but still....! A movie that was an inspirational rip off of The Thing and Alien would seem to be my cup of tea. Maybe my tolerance for B movies wasn't so great back then. Hmmm.

Leviathan stars Peter Weller as Beck, an unfortunate geologist put in charge of an undersea mining operation by the enigmatic company, looking to make a motherload mining silver from the bottom of the ocean. Yes: silver. As it turns out, a modest amount of googling reveals that there are many people (and institutes) looking at deep sea mining as a possibility for the future, if they can convince  people that the environmental impact is minimal, and that the possible gain is worthwhile. Interesting.

Anyway, this movie must happen in the near future from today, because they didn't have this sort of tech in 1989...which means yes, the film is full of anachronistic computer technology...but that's beside the issue! The film focuses on eight deep sea divers who run the operation, using heavy deep sea diving lift suits to mine for silver. As always they are an eclectic crowd of individualists who are miraculously highly skilled at what they do despite all suffering from sociopathy and borderline personality disorder issues, or at least suffering from what I call the "TV-actoritis" personality problem. When the best actor here, the guy hamming it all up, is Peter Weller....you know you've got one of "those movies" on your hands. You know the type: hamfisted actors with over-the-top personalities built for conflict, a surplus of overly dramatic hack emotions and a total lack of believable behavior, such that you remember the characters not for their credible nature or realistic depictions of what deep sea divers might act like, but instead how badly they act and how inappropriately they conduct themselves almost constantly on screen. That sort of acting.

Amanda Pays (Williams) was no Milla Jovovich, but she could have been

The movie has a lot of "throwback" elements which surprise me, given it came out in 1989 and I am pretty sure that a majority of films were moving away from the canned sounds and effects of the prior couple decades. Today its a joke...a bad one, that's been told way too many times, when we hear the "stormtrooper scream," better known as the Wilhelm Scream, that accompanies any nameless mook falling from a building. You don't hear that scream here, but you will hear a lot of other such noises, from the sound of a punching fist to the slurping monster. It's not as bad as...say...Galaxy of Terror, but noticeable. Maybe it was less noticeable back then. Who knows.

Okay, so the crew of this mining vessel stumbles across the deep sea wreck of a Soviet vessel called the Leviathan. The cocky jerk guy makes a mistake which reveals the wreck and then finds a safe full of treasure from the crew on board. The team breaks open and distributes the loot from the safe, but a bottle of vodka is confiscated by the captain to teach the jerk guy a lesson. The jerk, of course, pockets a flask of vodka he finds. Later, he and the obligatory hot gal with loose morals share a sip and of course suffer the consequences for their impudence, but in the meantime the crew settles in, thinking they are close to getting lifted back to the surface for a switch-out and with some bonus loot as a nice extra.

Of course, it doesn't work out like that. The captain and the doctor on board watch a VHS tape made by the dead Russian captain, which suggests very, very obliquely that the ship had an outbreak of some sickness on board and then....nada. So there's a tiny bit of foreshadowing.

Speaking of doctors and copycats, the doctor is revealed to have a suspicious past but since this film is allegedly set in the near future they couldn't make him an android and making him actually be a stooge for the man would have been a bit too obvious. Still, they know our expectations as set by Alien and The Thing, so they do play with this a bit later on.

Eventually the jerk and his gal pal are revealed to be sick. First the jerk succumbs, as he develops a scaly rash, then seems to die. Then, as the rest of the crew is checked out, his girlfriend is revealed to be sick, but before anyone catches on she stumbles across the jerk's body, realizes something horrible is mutating him, and goes to off herself in the shower with some convenient surgical knives lying around. Silly gal! This monster has the mighty power of both Alien and Thing DNA, and it easily uses her dead flesh to its own further ends not long after.

The doctor and captain realize this is bad news and try to flush the jerk's body (which is melding with the woman's corpse now). The doctor suspects "genetic alteration" or so his magic 8-ball computer (or whomever he was talking to; it's not always clear) suspects. The body is mutating, coming back to life, and they manage to toss it down the hatch at the last second, but not before a chunk breaks off Thing-style and starts hatching a fiendish mutant lamprey when no one is looking.

The movie then rapidly degenerates into a depressing variation on Benny Hill in which everyone runs around awkwardly  for various reasons insuring they are all alone as bad things start to happen and the bodycount rises.

Amidst all this there's a corporate shill played by Meg Foster (who has terrifying eyes, by the way) who provides the late-80's appropriate role as ominous corporate villain that you know pretty much from the instant you see her is going to cause problems somehow. She is mostly present as a voice and image from the surface throughout the film, until the finale.

Evil Meg Foster is Evil

I could go on, but you all know how this ends. If you think you haven't seen it already, guess again. The most surprising twists in this movie are as follows:

1. The doctor, while played suspiciously, is revealed to be conscientious of the problem and takes action to quarantine everyone by jettisoning the escape bubbles. At least, that's what I got out of his actions. The important thing was that he made sure that any escape could become suitably dramatic.

2. The people the creature absorbs seem to remain partially alive while it marauds about. It looks kind of like a big rubbery deep one with people parts hanging off. It's not that smart, but like the Alien it grows at a much greater rate than it's food intake would suggest, and must have an absolutely near-perfect conversion rate of protein/matter to body mass. Also, it's only really distinguishing traits as a hybrid of the Alien and Thing are that it likes to absorb dead matter, and it does so fairly slowly. Also, it's a classic Big Rubber Suit monster so the threat it poses is best presented in as oblique and vague a manner as possible lest we get too good a look at it.

3. All those cool deep sea suits and no underwater fight with the monster? No modern CGI film could resist! But in 1989 I imagine the budget to make such an encounter look good was way too costly and the results way too cheesy.

4. Three people make it to the end, including Captain Beck, Williams (Amanda Pays), and Jones (Ernie Hudson) who is no doubt wishing he'd kept working for the Ghostbusters. Three is a lot for this sort of movie. On the other hand when they are evacuated by copter after a very brief interaction with the monster (one of them) Jones is nearly killed but rescued by the captain...then sort of disappears at the end, giving the captain and Williams a chance to deck Ms. Martin (the corporate stooge). Yep, Peter Weller hits a lady. Then some very peppy music plays to let the audience know its all okay and you can leave the theater feeling good about life. So I guess I was stunned that there was no establishing shot showing Jones mutating on the helipad into a creature while snacking on the rescue team. Amazing!

"Get back, doctor. Either you're about to reveal that you're an android or this thing will eat your arms, I'm sure of it."

There are many fridge logic moments in this movie. A few of my favorites:

1. As always the psych dept. for the company appears to need some work, as more than a few of the deep sea operators here appear to have incredibly poor judgement for such a dangerous facility.

2. At one point they jettison some mutating bodies. Why did the creature which spawned from the bodies stick around to chase the survivors to the surface? Seriously, it had its pick of the entire ocean's fauna to snack on, grow and assimilate. But no, it chooses petty revenge and pays for it. Hell, it had to be eating something out there, because the one at the end is clearly bigger than the one in the imploded mining facility, which absorbed roughly three or four bodies.

3. If the creature could assimilate dead flesh from a virus of some sort laced in vodka, why would any explosives or other injuries really harm it for the long run? Assuming the flesh wasn't really dead but just in suspended animation, and the virus is simply restitching everything genetically to come back as a Dagon-like deep one of some sort, then even if you blow it up, wouldn't the virus just restart with whatever was left? The actual biology of the Leviathan creature is really, really vague and difficult to reconcile with reality, precisely because it can't quite come out and say, "this works just like the Thing does," or even that it's hideously alien and therefore could be working in some weird xenobiological way like the alien (Prometheus aside).

On the Russian ship there is a skeleton of one of the creatures, but its not entirely clear that the creature died because the ship sank and it drowned or what. Given it seems to be a natural deep sea predator once formed that seems unlikely. I guess the creature's morphology is intended to be "formed from the virus, but otherwise a normal monster once grown up," so it's not supposed to be as Thing-like as one might imagine. Perhaps the fact that it is so obviously derivative is what forces the viewer to draw comparisons and then notice that peculiarity of how it works.

4. Evil corporate shill is evil. Ms. Martin's son is Wesker, I think. You know what would have been an amazing twist? If she wasn't evil. I know, hard to ask of a 80's film, but....seriously. That would have made a nice change of pace.

Okay, so enough bashing the movie. Was it worth it? I sort of enjoyed it. The hamfisted acting made the movie endearing in a TV special sort of way, albeit much better than typical SyFy fare. It was possibly even slightly better than Alien: Resurrection (talk about damning with faint praise!) The FX were generally quite good, although comparing the film to other works such as Abyss and Sphere will quickly lead to the observation that this film is actually kind of limited, but good at working with what it has. Peter Weller was amusing in his heroic role, and carried the film reasonably well despite lacking the sort of horror-action hero charisma that other, similar leads such as Sam Neill or Kurt Russell convey so easily. Still, the movie is so derivative and so awkward at times that it's hard to feel that good about it. I would give it a solid C average.

Go see Leviathan if you've already seen all of the other objectively good films and are interested in a comparison study of why a derivative film will fail if it's primary motivation is to be described as "Just like Alien and The Thing but under water!" The lesson being: gimmicky me-too films will always expose their true color. Which is gimme-summathat-cash green.

Alien+Thing+Deep One = Leviathan creature

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil 5

Day Sixteen: Resident Evil 5 (PC Edition)

Can you tell I have a thing for Resident Evil? I've tried to touch base on the movies and key games, but so much more remains. Today we'll take a retrospective look at Resident Evil 5. I didn't actually play through this game until just a few months ago, actually; it took me a while to be in the right mood to engage with it, and I waited to secure a cheap copy on Steam. This proved to be a good strategy; I might have been more annoyed at this game if I had paid $60 for it.

Resident Evil 5 picks up in the near-now much as RE 4 did with Leon Kennedy, this time focusing on the current-day antics of Chris Redfield and his new partner, Sheva Alomar, both now employed by the Bioterrism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA). There are a few layers of "plot" going on here: first, Chris has been busy pursuing Wesker, ne'er do-well from the original games and former stooge for Umbrella. Turns out he's been heavily experimented on, and is basically turning into an "Alice," except in the RE game universe. He's been very naughty, too, kidnapping poor Jill Valentine and experimenting on her using mind control, among other things.

In the midst of all this a local South African province in the town of Kijuju is being terrorized by an outbreak of what was previously called Las Plagas and is now known to create majini, which are basically an extension of the same viral outbreak, creating weird parasitic entities which possess the host and make them go axe-murderer on everyone.

Before the end of this game you will have burned, blasted and bashed your way through half of South Africa....or it will certainly feel like it. This game ditches much of the series trademark puzzle solving and slow pacing for a much faster, more action-oriented over-the-top cinematic adventure. In fact, the cinematics in this film are pretty good, noticeably more interesting than the same stuff you'll see in the movie Resident Evil: Afterlife, which took direct visual inspiration from RE 5.

In the game's defense it does have moments that feel very much like the Resident Evil that we all came to know in the original trilogy of games (plus Code: Veronica). However, the game veers away from much of that to focus heavily on gunplay, "maps" which you move through to clear out, and a general focus on action over tension. This works against the title, and ultimately is why RE 5 fails where prior games succeeded. The tension, the dread of what lies around the corner, the prospect of sudden shocks and thrills...the risk of unstoppable opponents; these are all features of the older games, largely discarded now in favor of vast waves of enemies coming at you in elaborate set-piece maps that, while pretty, start to feel more like arenas that you need to clear before the next gate opens (and indeed that's usually how you proceed). There's little in the way of puzzle solving, story pieces are sparse and often little more than interesting fluff you can otherwise ignore, and the game's main showcase revolves around key boss battles and events which, while impressive, are not enough on their own to sustain the game over time.

I really found that whole hydrofoil/swamp sequence tiring, to take an example. You get a swamp boat, a fan-powered craft you must take from point A to three other points, each of which has a switch you need to hit, basically, but to do so you have to survive waves of zombies...er, majini. The areas you go to are all more or less alike. The sequence of actions doesn't vary much, and few distinct plot threads pop up worth noting.

It becomes painfully apparent at moments like this that the gem devs are giving us busy work. Busy work happens in almost all computer games, but the trick is making it so that the player either doesn't notice or doesn't care, because they are having too much fun. RE 5 has some spots where you do not feel engaged enough to be having fun, and the thin veneer begins to wear off, revealing the gruesome underbelly of a grind beneath. Not a good thing.

There's no tension here; in some ways you could replace "majini" with zombies, or russians, or nazis and you'd find yourself in any number of other games. When the thing that makes your franchise distinct is missing, you have a problem.


The game also saddles you with a permanent NPC partner who's primary job is to get in your way and swipe useful stuff before you can. In my final completion playthrough I got pretty good at managing her, but for a single-player game it was an entirely needless extra feature, not one I'd complain about much, though, because Sheva added a bit to the story and made for an interesting character in the cut scenes. If you get a chance to play this multiplayer, it is worth it, and while I would agree with most that playing co-op drains some of the isolation and tension away, don't worry; RE 5 already got rid of all that for you.

Resident Evil 5 does try to deal with the problem of RE 4's impressively adept gunrunner. Rather than having you occasionally stumble across a guy selling guns, you simply go to a loadout/purchase screen between mission chapters. Oddly, this has the effect of being slightly less immersion breaking, I guess, although only because its employing a fairly generic approach used by many other action games. It would have been better to integrate these moments in a way that made more sense (i.e. finding occasional weapon drops that let you open the purchase screen) but there's no way around the fact that someone has strewn a ton of cash and valuables across the South African landscape, and you are pilfering all of it to buy your equipment, since the BSAA appears to be badly underfunded.

Sigh. I hate it when gameist elements bash their way into a title known for its sense of immersion and coherence (even if in a campy fashion).

Personally, I'd love to see what the team behind Spec Ops: The Line could do with a franchise like Resident Evil. Imagine the possibilities; Spec Ops had no supernatural elements as such, and yet it was considerably better at managing the tension, isolation and horror of its subject. Hell, you had two NPCs with you in that game and they actually contributed to the feeling of growing horror by virtue of their presence. Amazing stuff.

If you don't mind that RE 5 is basically a slightly more sophisticated modern on-rails shooter that just dolls itself up with the co-op/NPC feature, slightly more interesting levels and swaps out zombies or russians for majini, then you will find this is a fun game. If, however, you want more than just a story continuation of the Resident Evil plot and would also like the Resident Evil Feel, then you're likely to face disappointment here.

I'll give Resident Evil 5 a C+, chiefly because the stuff it does well stands out...it's just not very Resident Evil at this point. I enjoyed playing it, but I was disappointed that someone had scrubbed too hard and washed away the stuff that made this franchise distinct.

I've heard Resident Evil 6 takes RE 5's action over tension focus and ups it a notch. As of the time of writing I'll be picking that one up next, so I can see for myself. Maybe a review soon...

Thirty One Days of Horror: The Lost Tribe

Day Fifteen: The Lost Tribe

This direct-to-video special features Lance Henrickson, probably the only noteworthy name in this movie. It proves that even Lance needs to eat, and sometimes doing a louse B movie is what it takes to bring the bacon home.

This movie isn't exactly bad...it's got some redeeming bits, but the film's pace and style are all wrong. The Lost Tribe has a plotline that, in the hands of a better team, could have produced a more potent and focused movie. Unfortunately, what we've got instead is this movie, which manages to captivate, annoy and ultimately discard all the good will it generates before the credits roll.

The plot is hard to describe without wanting to ask, "Why?" followed by a quick query as to who on this film has it out for the Vatican (or thought that the only thing the Da Vinci Code was missing was...literally...a cannibalistic missing link). The really quick summary is this: group of friends on boat cruise find a castaway and end up wrecking their boat on a remote island. Cannibal ape men start eating people while Lance Henricksen and his men show up as hit-men for the Vatican who have been trying to hide the discovery of living fossils...the ape men....from the public because apparently the screen-writer for this travesty thought it would be cool. In the end just about everyone dies in a sequence that has borrowed more than a few queues from the original Predator movie.



Follow that? Okay, trust me when I say that the actual movie excels at over-complicating the exact same basic plot as Descent, except imagine if Descent had a gang of Baptist Spelunkers in it trying to hide proof of the link between man and bat. Or something.

The Cabin in the Woods take: I watched this movie before Cabin in the Woods was released, which means I am forever slightly more soured on it than I might otherwise have been. Technically the "Vatican assassins" might not fit well in the Cabinverse, but you know what? They could. The Vatican is so busy purging the world of various hominids related to man, it might well be clueless about the threat of the old gods. Either way, you find the jock, the scholar, the virgin and the whore in The Lost Tribe, each waiting to be sacrificed to their chosen fate: cannibal half-men who spend an alarming amount of time pretending to act like the much more sophisticated and well-armed predator.



Slamming it with a C+! The plus is because there are some well-done chunks of film floating within the muddy morass of nonsense that this film spins out, and the creature effects are extremely well done. I'm a bit harsh on this movie, but I do admit, the FX are pretty decent.

If you need to indulge yourself in tales of primeval half-men on a remote island, however, I strongly suggest you pick up Castaways by Brian Keene. It's basically this movie, but much, much better. Much. 

Thirty One Days of Horror: The Devil's Rock

Day Fourteen: The Devil's Rock

The films I like best are the ones I don't know about until I stumble across them by accident. Maybe I'm wandering around the local movie shop and I see a catchy cover...or maybe I spot something while browsing Ebay at random, or something pops up on Netflix that smells of unknown and undiscovered. The Devil's Rock is one of those movies.



This low budget New Zealand movie takes place in the Channel Islands during World War II and focuses on two New Zealander commandos sent in to take out a German gun emplacement embedded on an island (yes, believe it or not New Zealand put its two cents into WWII along with the rest of us).

Captain Grogan and Sergeant Tane are in for more than they expected, however, when they discover that something is not right in the German artillery bunkers...there's evidence of something horrific going on, and a desperate German soldier stumbles seeking escape across the two before meeting his fate. It seems the Germans are up to their usual tricks, looking for an occult way to win the war...and as usual, things have gotten out of hand.

With a fantastic performance by the actors involved (Gina Varela does a great job of being seductive and deadly all at once) there is much to recommend The Devil's Rock to horror fans. It's got a great, methodical build-up, excellent set-pieces, some good old fashioned blood & gore using real special effects that didn't involve CGI (best as I could tell) and a plot which manages to take a traditional macabre weird tale and put a great new spin on it.



One thing I found amusing was that this movie honestly made for a better "Resident Evil" survival horror experience than most of the Resident Evil films. It has horrific scenery porn, a sense of isolation, a disturbing menace against which no amount of ammo is going to help, and a slow, methodical pace coupled with moments of uncontrollable terror and action.

Check it out! This is one of my A rated movies.