The 8th Day of Horror: The Old Ones (2023)

 

The Old Ones (2023)

The glorious world of low budget horror films inspired by or directly paying homage to H.P. Lovecraft is seemingly endless, and at no point have I found more than one or two of them to be worthwhile. The better Lovecraft films tend to be those which riff off of a Lovecraft story and then proceed to do their own thing (think the films of Stuart Gordon, for the best example). So the question is,, is "The Old Ones," a 2023 production by Chad Ferrin, actually going to break this trend and fall into the "few but good" side of the camp?

Hmmmm....let's put it this way, I am typing this as I watch the movie, because my desire to get this event over with is that strong. So strong I want to get this written because I don't know if I can make it to the end of this movie or not, so if I commit to writing this now I will, in turn, be forced to finish this movie....

I'll provide some positive notes for The Old Ones first: it's got some nice rubber Deep One suits and the overall creature FX are well conceived. The production spends a lot of time trying to at least be as faithful to the conventional style and appearance of its creatures as possible, with a lean toward the way they have been portrayed in the RPG art. There is also an effort to periodically riff off of the many famous quotes and phrases of Lovecraft, albeit often out of context or maybe spoken awkwardly by very, very amateur actors. A better script might allow these quotes to play out better, and better actors might make the readings sound authentic.

Also, it has some decent scoring for the soundtrack. No out of place music, and the music sets the mood better than the film itself could. The audio is pretty decent overall.

Oh, there's some gratuitous nudity, too....I feel like maybe the gal should have gotten a full body tan for this scene? 

A couple days back as I watched Yellow Brick Road I thought to myself that this was a well intentioned amateur film, but it clearly had some good elements carrying the weight of the film, without which it would have been much more of a slog. Good acting was a key component, there. Although none of the actors on that movie were seasoned, they nonetheless brought something earnest to the table and did a good job of convincing me that they were exactly the characters they were, trapped in the situation they were in....and only occasionally was the illusion broken. The Old Ones....well...it's got some people playing roles in it, but I suspect that none of them are real or even necessarily trained actors...let me go take a look on IMDB....okay, so most of the actors in this movie have decent portfolios, though not necessarily award winning. So maybe the director is the issue here? Chad Ferrin has done quite a few very low budget movies, and a mess of Lovecraft pastiches, too. In fact I notice he did another one of my least favorite films ever: The Deep Ones from 2020; in defense of the movie I am watching right now it is technically better than its predecessor. 

As I'm watching a great FX-laden scene is happening in which our old protagonist, who is being hunted by the deep ones, is trapped while going to the bathroom in a restroom stall and guy is transforming into a particularly tentacled deep one to get him. You know, I have to say....the FX are sort of worth it! But the stuff in between are just so...bad....oh so very, very bad. 

Oh the younger protagonist came to the old man's rscue by dumping some salt shakers onto the tentacle monster. Oh, another guy just said "shoggoth." I guess that was a shoggoth. I do indeed remember when the Dyer expedition survived their encounter in Antarctica by defeating the shoggoth with a....salt and buttering...

Sigh. This movie really makes me wish a really good director with a real budget would do an adaptation of Shadows over Innsmouth. Ah well. 

I am struggling but will make it to the end. The role of Nyarlathotep is played as an annoyed, somewhat exasperatedly irritated fellow by the actor, who is perhaps trying to channel some of that old Jeremy Irons energy? Well, that was certainly a choice!

Tillinghast is mentioned as a plot point. First time I think he was mentioned.

They entered the least interesting cellar in horror movie history.

Wait....why do Nyarlathotep and his ghasts have a comedically large fire hydrant next to their shipping container?

As the one gang of old ones possessing some security guards show up to talk with the comedicallly ironic Nyarly, I suddenly feel like someone made this movie with the cast of a tv series like...hmmm...30 Rock? Northern Exposure?

Oh wait the security guard is Randolph Carter? Possessed by him? What????

Oh no, he's just "Randoph Carter, security guard."

Okay the multiheaded Nyarly effect is kinda cool.

This movie would be better of Bruce Campbell were in it. I bet they couldn't afford him.

 Tillinghast and his machine are drawing very unfortunate comparisons to the considerably better movie, From Beyond. 

The elder protagonist wants to use the Tillinghast machine to go back in time. Ugh.

Om my god, the adorable creatures visible with the resonator are puppets on strings!

 The great soundtrack is doing 100% of the heavy lifting for the Tillinghast scenes. Without this music it would be painfully unwatchable.

So our elder protagonist, who is 155  years old, wants to go back to 1950...to change the future by not getting on a boat? So the boat ride was when he got possessed? 

It ended, with a predictable and nonsensical twist, as was inevitable. Bu the important thing is...itis over.

I am free.

If you can find this movie for free, and are wiling to skip through to see the rubber monster suit moments, it might be worth a minute or three of your time. I...I don't know if I can watch anymore of this. This movie is truly bad, and not even in that "so bad its good" kind of way. Solid F!

The 7th Day of Horror: Teleforum

 

Teleforum (PC)

Teleforum is a point-and-click analog horror game from Monumental Collab, who look like they have a fine knack for this sort of game. The good news for those still suffering from PTSD over the 90's era of pixel-bitching point-and-clicks is that this one is full of modern conveniences, so it plays well and I advise when playing that you mouse over everything, some stuff will trigger that you might not expect. I did a playthough and then handed it over to my son to do his own run; I have found that the boundless energy and optimism of youth will lead to unexpected results every time over the old jaded Gen X gamer. A single playthrough can be done in less than an hour (my first run was only about 35 minutes), but subsequent playthroughs yielded some interesting additional results I had overlooked, and my son unlocked several new achievements. Indeed, if achievements are a goal of yours, this thing is loaded with plenty of low-hanging achievement fruits.

The premise of Teleforum is simple: a reporter named Juliana and her cameraman (your character) are visiting the apartment of a fellow reporter Walter who recently killed himself following a grisly event at the broadcasting station. He brought a tape to be played, but a technical error prevented it from playing. Juliana wants to interview his widow, and see if she can figure out why Walter did what he did...and see if there's a working copy of the tape somewhere. Things get increasingly weird until at last the tape is available for viewing, and then things begin to loop, as your cameraman begins to sense that he's done this before... 

Teleforum is also adjacent to the hidden object subgenre which has recently evolved into horror with walking simulator elements, where you move through a familiar environment and then look for things that are different each time. Teleforum is more of a hybrid.....but subsequent playthroughs with different choices have yielded some interesting results that were not evident or accessible the first time around. 

While playing, I did start to think a bit about the book and film Ringu, which of course has a haunted VHS tape at the center of its mystery. Unlike Ringu, Teleforum provides a compelling mystery with plenty of hints, but offers few real answers. 

Ultimately Teleforum works well for having a 80's era analog setting, excellent creepy audio and a compelling short story with lots of variables within its restricted environment. It is also free on Steam, so there is that! I enjoyed it enough I purchased the supporter's pack. I give it a solid A, especially considering the price of admission.

Bonus Spoiler/Hint:

There are codes you need to find for hidden endings....

The 6th Day of Horror: The Nun (2018)

 

The Nun (2018)

This has been on my shelf for a long time, as a collection of Conjuring Universe movies I bought for my son to watch. I watched the first Conjuring film and while it was fine, it was also a bit too mainstream and "jump scare-laden" for me to be terribly invested in it. I also probably know too much about the real Ed and Lorraine Warrens, conceding only that their fictional selves are probably how they imagined they really were. 

That said, my son advised that to truly dive into the Conjuring Universe you should start with the film that depicts the earliest events, and that is apparently The Nun. Set in Romania in 1954, it focuses on a remote castle turned into a nunnery where a local man witnesses a nun hanging from a noose, a nun who jumped to her death to deprive an evil entity (demon?) from possessing her. Trapped in the old castle, this force prowls in wait, and the Vatican obliges by sending Demian Bichir as Father Burke, the Catholic equivalent of a Special Investigator along with the young not-yet-a-nun Taissa Farmiga as Sister Irene. They meet their guide, the man who found the dead nun, named Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) and then proceed to spend the night in the haunted locale, which was all that the movie needed to kick off what is basically an hour and a half long jump-scare thrill ride through a FX laden haunted house. 

So first, in defense of this movie, I actually rather enjoyed it even if I was sort of hoping it might take more time to actually slow down and put a bit more effort into its storytelling. This sort of horror film has its market, though, and in terms of loading the screen with scary moments, jump scare, quick reveals and sudden plot twists it does its job admirably. It is not art, but it is damned proficient at what it does. 

Second, while watching I realized that this movie, from a horror RPG perspective, is a solid "one night stand" sort of adventure. You could easily take the core conceit of this film (haunted castle full of dead nuns and a demon) and make a fun evening session out of it with a game like Call of Cthulhu or Liminal Horror. It is, in this regard, an excellent template for such things.

That said, I had a moment midway in to the film where I realized that this movie reminded me in a few ways of the much older movie about an ancient evil locked away in a haunted castle called The Keep, The Keep was focused on a much more methodical pacing, and of course suffers for the special effects of its day, plus it was an imperfect adaptation of a much better novel. I happen to have the Vinegar Syndrome release of The Keep, so may review that next for a proper contrast. 

One final thought: this movie leans heavily into Catholic horror. Everything I know about Catholicism comes from movies, I realized, and I have no idea if this is a genuinely good depiction of those bits which make it in the movie or not, but that does mean that The Nun is definitely firmly planted in the Catholic Supernatural Horror subgenre.

All told: it was a fun movie, and a good "scary jump scare woo what's gonna get them next???" Sort of romp. Solid C+ and worth watching for GMs interested in some set locale and "packaged plot" inspiration.

The 5th Day of Horror: Censor (2021)

 

Censor (2021)

I have mentioned this movie before in my "best of" end of year lists, but I don't think I've actually reviewed it. Censor is a fascinating slow-burn psychological horror film set during the early eighties in England, focusing on the Video Nasties scare at the time, in which the British government was determined to censor or outright ban the wave of local and international films focused on gore, violence and other disturbing content. 

Niamh Algar plays Enid Banes, a woman who works as one of the censors, reviewing films, noting unacceptable content, and then reporting what must be cut from a film for acceptable release, or outright banning content. Enid has a problem, though: it is quickly evident by her obsessive compulsive behaviors and unusually flat affect that something is not quite right with her. She meets with her parents, who have secured a death certificate for her younger sister, who it turns out disappeared years ago in 1965 under mysterious circumstances, though Enid herself was present when her sister vanished, though she has no memory of what really happened. Instead, Enid watches the movies she is supposed to critique and advise on, and occasionally a film presents something that seems to jog her memories....including one film depicting two sisters in the woods when one is gruesomely murdered....by the other sister! Something about the scene is just a bit too familiar to Enid, and she becomes obsessed with finding the producer of the film, a lecherous sort she had briefly met.

Amidst all this, a story blows up about an amnesiac killer, a man who slew his family, and a journalist who links the names of two specific censors (of which Enid is one) to the release of a film with content that seems to mirror the actual killing. As the press begins to hound her, Enid grows more obsessed with the films that seem to be leading her down a trail to the discovery of where her sister really went, as she is convinced she was abducted and is alive somewhere, being forced to make horror movies.

I dare not say any more about this film without a proper spoiler warning, so instead I suggest that you should go watch it (and not watch any media about it, if you haven't already been spoiled on its content) instead. It is a slow burn horror for at least the first half of the film, then ramps up rapidly. I love this style of film with its slow, methodical pacing and clever use of cinematography for effect. Niamh Algar is excellent as the protagonist of the film as well, and she is the sole focus of the camera for the run of the film. Solid A for me!

SPOILER SECTION

Okay, you have been warned! Enid is, to begin with, the focus of the camera for the entirety of the film. We are effectively watching what she does from her own context and understanding of things. Every now and then something happens and maybe a contradictory flash of something else not quite right appears, suggesting that not all is as it seems. Enid is a classic unreliable narrator, and while her "narration" is via the camera itself, what we are seeing is entirely affected by her own unusual state of mind. Over the course of the film the dimensions of the screen shift from the usual widescreen format to a more conventional 4:3 format, typical of the grainy old televisions these VHS tapes would once have been watched on. The more frayed Enid's sense of reality, the quicker the screen locks down to a 4:3 format. This is one of a handful of films I have seen which manage to cleverly use this format to good effect (The Lighthouse is another). 

Enid's clearly not well. She has obsessive compulsive behaviors, her flat affect suggests strange emotional detachment, and midway through the film she abruptly (sort of by accident) murders a film producer in a truly grisly manner and instead of being horrified at what she did, she quickly behaves as if nothing unusual happened. In short order she makes her way to a film shoot where she believes an actress is about to be killed, an actress she is convinced is her long lost sister. When she gets there, her ability to tell reality from fiction is effectively gone; the earlier background story of the man who murdered his family after being influenced by a video nasty is no longer the problem; Enid herself is the one who has become influenced by the video nasties, and she is unable to tell her hallucinations from reality. The film ends on a grim note as she returns to her parents, with what she thinks is her sister found at last, though jagged moments of reality interrupt to see horrified parents and a terrified actress.

The film does not address a couple items I sort of wish it had, though I can understand why it might not have: Enid's long lost sister possibly was killed by Enid, if you conclude from her viewing of "Don't go in the Church" that the depiction of two sisters, one being murdered by an axe, is triggering her memory of that day because that is actually what happened. That raises questions, though: such as where did her sister's body go? Did her parents help cover it up? Or was her sister really done away with or abducted, as Enid seems to believe, despite the fact that later events suggest her powerful ability to disassociate from reality and see what she wants means literally anything could have happened to her sister. Perhaps that is the point. Sometimes it is just fine for a movie to leave deliberate loose ends. 

Anyway, if you like slow, methodical horror that builds tension and dread with slow precision rather than jump scare, I definitely advise you check Censor out! It remains one of my favorites. I got my copy from Vinegar Syndrome, indeed it was my first purchase from them.

The 4th Day of Horror: Yellow Brick Road (2010)

 

Yellow Brick Road (2010)

In the realm of low budget indie horror films the ability to manage a story, get some decent cinematography and directing in, and maybe even some good acting and special effects is a smoking gun for future success stories. Sometimes no one succeeds...but also, maybe, they don't totally fail, either? Yellow Brick Road feels like a film that didn't quite succeed, but also managed to pull together just enough decent cinematography, and not bad acting, then wrapped it in an enigmatic and largely inexplicable, threadbare storyline to motivate the plot, and made something watchable (at least once) for those who enjoy watching amateur efforts at serious film making. For people just looking for a solid film I might point to a few hundred other options, though.

Yellow Brick Road is about a man who pulls together a team of like-minded friends to investigate a mysterious event in a town where a bunch of people back in 1940 set off on a wilderness trail and disappeared, never to be seen alive again (dead, sure, just not alive). A modest effort is made at introducing our disparate array of investigators as the film slowly moves into the realm of insanely low budget horror, in which (to reference a common refrain of the Red Letter Media gang), most of the film is shot in the best free place you can find: the woods. 

The story of the film is very basic: they go into the woods to follow this trail from decades before. Eventually they wander into a Liminal Horror event as they realize they are losing track of their sense of direction and maybe even time, as strange vintage music plays everywhere and nowhere at once, haunting and driving them on to find its source. Gradually, one by one they go mad, and eventually the last man standing, our protagonist, finds he has come full circle and the story ends because the runtime necessitates and ending. 

Thankfully, this process is made bearable by some decent young actors making a good effort, some fun but cheap special effects (my son was sufficiently grossed out at one dismemberment scene he lost his appetite) and the strange and vague references to The Wizard of Oz keep you wanting to know why this old movie hangs over the film like some sort of allegory. The answers at the end, which are no answers at all, do nothing to clarify, leaving you either annoyed at the fact that the film seemed to barely do anything with its theme, or perhaps satisfied, if you are a bit masochistic, at its lack of desire to provide any sort of closure beyond the barest suggestion of some sort of loop.

The film makes clever use of New Hampshire's woodlands mixed with eerie forties music to provide a creepy liminal horror/backrooms vibe. This is, in fact, the main menace in the film, the endless woods and the ever present diegetic music causing people to slowly go insane. 

The most exciting moment in this movie for me was watching the extras on the making of the movie and discovering that a younger Robert Eggers was the costume designer for this film. It has me wondering now if anyone else in this movie has went on to better things....scanning IMDB I am going to say "sort of...?" There do appear to be a few other horror movies under the writer/directors' belts, with slightly better ratings, so I may have to check them out. That Eggers was a costume designer who subsequently went on to a serious film career (Nosferatu, The Witch, The Lighthouse, Northman) proves that real talent must start somewhere!

The old notion that B movies can get a lot out of filming in the wilderness is thoroughly played out here. The scenery is in general put to good use, but the film thankfully ends right around the time you are kind of hoping it will; it just barely overstays its welcome.

The box art of the copy I got (with a Scarecrow on it) references a single scene in the movie that left me wondering for some time (right to the very end) just how the scarecrow got there; I won't spoil the details, but someone had to have done it....and we don't learn who that is until the very end; and even then, nothing is explained at all. 

A lot of horror is easily explained if you simply assume that everything happening is the survivor's purgatory, behind which some cenobite-like monster is pulling the strings. But hey, a film's plot shouldn't rely on another media resource to explain its own absence of a plot, and honestly? I think the movie's ending is trying for some sort of surreal way to tie it to the beginning, though it does so in the least satisfying way I could imagine, if only because our nemesis (if that is what he is) is otherwise absent from the film except as capstones to the tale.

At the very end, I think even if nothing else were explained, I wouldn't have minded a more substantive explanation for why the Oz themes are even a thing, beyond the hint (I think?) that maybe Wizard of Oz was the movie people watched before disappearing. 

Anyway, I would rank this a solid D+, chiefly because it had some nice scenery, not bad acting, some good but exceedingly low budget gore, clever use of liminal horror's obsession with muzak and interstitial spaces, and even if I was unsatisfied with the ending it did show promise. Worth a watch if its streaming free somewhere and you have a high tolerance for amateur low budget film-making.

The 3rd Day of Horror: Ghost Virus (Graham Masterton)

 

Ghost Virus by Graham Masterton

If you are unfamiliar with Graham Masterton then I would imagine you are not much of a horror buff, or perhaps someone who does not look upon the recent movement toward classic era horror fiction of the 70's and 80's that has led to restorative projects like Paperbacks from Hell, and loads of entertaining pastiches and homages to a distinct period of two decades' worth of gore-filled, often horrifying, sometimes ridiculous, fiction from a time when small paperback formats ruled supreme. If you want to know more about this I recommend finding a copy of Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell overview of the era, a fine read which gives you some firm footing on which to stand in exploring this very specific style of horror fiction. 

If you want to go real deep, just start by reading Graham Masterton! His prolific decades as what I like to think of as the Steven King of Europe (or would that be that King is the Masterton of America?) have led to some of the wildest, goriest and most bizarre stories in the genre. His early career kicked off with Manitou and then The Sphinx, and it just got better and better from there. I loved to read his books back int he 80's, and was pleasantly surprised to see that he is still up to no good even today. 

I actually grabbed the fourth book in the Patel & Pardoe series first (What Hides in the Cellar) and quickly caught on that this book had recurring characters from prior novels so I sought out the first in the line: Ghost Virus. The protagonists of the series are both detectives in London district, Jerry Pardoe who normally likes to run down pretty thieves, and the somewhat more enigmatic detective seargent Jamila Patel, who happens to be especially good at what she does due to a little gift she has in which she can divine whether a person is telling truth or not. A weird murder involving a local immigrant family draws the two together as subsequent murders, each with an inexplicable cause of death, begin to form an odd pattern. That pattern  grows over time as the detectives catch on that something very weird and supernatural is going on, and around midway through the book it goes off the rails. Then you get to the final act and realize you weren't even close to going off the rails until then. 

I really hesitate to say anything about it because the sheer audacity of the source of the supernatural killings is so nuts, but I have to say a little bit: I will put it this way: the source of the murders, and the gradual build toward an explanation (which is, similar to many other horror tales a somehow acceptable yet also ludicrous explanation) is so over the top that I can't readily imagine anyone ever being able to turn this into a movie and be taken seriously; it works so much better in print than it ever could on a medium like film, simply because Masterton himself can make you desperately nervous around your own coat, thanks to the power of word in imagination....a feat that a more visual medium would have a very hard time pulling off without aiming for farce or campiness.

Masterton is such a great writer that it is hard for me to put a book of his down once I start and I blew through this over a couple days. I am now looking forward to starting the next book in the series, and I am intrigued to see where Masterton takes his two hapless detectives next. Solid A!

SPOILER SECTION:

Okay! Don't read on here if you want to read the book first. The supernatural threat in this book is a nutty concept: a ghost virus, a sort of propagating infectious supernatural plague that infects clothes. The clothes become possessed by the ghost memories of those who died under duress and desperately want to live....and can do so by finding victims they can get to wear them. At first its a couple coats, but then it turns into pretty much the entirety of everyone's wardrobes by the end of the book. The book suffers a bit from its focus on the detectives, mixed with the in-between chapters focusing on the victims. The ramp up to madness as you get close to the end and the nature of the threat looms large is not unlike the pacing in the movie Weapons, actually. You have a slow burn tale of weird murder and investigation, which slowly escalates to what seems like a supernatural serial killer using a strange medium, and then it turns into a full on zombie apocalypse at the end....but with animated clothing instead of zombies. Deadly, murderous, poltergeist-like possessed clothing flying everywhere and murdering likely hundreds in their wake. It is so utterly preposterous that I just stopped questioning the logic and went with the flow. It was like Masterton was challenging himself by seeing how he could write himself out of the corner he had painted himself into. Lovely stuff.

And that, you see, if why I can't wait to see what the subsequent novels in this series bring to the table!

The 2nd Day of Horror: Weapons (2025)

Weapons (2025)

You may have seen this one recently, as it became a runaway hit at the box office over the last month or two, but if you haven't, and you happen to like really weird horror films (and don't mind more jarring tonal shifts at odd moments) then Zach Cregger's Weapons is well worth a watch. Julia Garner plays a teacher named Justine caught up in a month of insanity in a small town where one day all of the children in her class except for one fail to show up....and it turns out all of them disappeared willingly in the middle of the night, sneaking out of the house to run Naruto Style* through town to an unknown location. The relatively ill equipped local police find themselves at a total loss as to where the kids went, which proves especially amusing (and perplexing) later on in the movie.

I won't go into any spoilers here as the movie is out now and best watched without any idea of what to expect, but I will comment on its format: while we have some main characters to root for, the movie is really almost an ensemble piece, focusing on the impact of this event on the lives of several disparate characters, and the stories of these five-ish protagonists weave together to assemble the whole story. It's weakness is that most of the actual reveal on what the heck is really going on is end-loaded with the final character we are introduced to, and I can't say I 100% bought in to some of the necessary leaps of logic for the events to transpire as they did, but the ending was overall sufficiently weird and crazy that the pay off was worth overlooking a few "that doesn't feel terribly likely," moments.

This has been a pretty good year for horror movies, and while I found that I loved some other horror films that came out this year a lot more (Nosferatu and Ash both come to mind), Weapons is a solid addition to a generally great roster for the genre this year. B+! Would have made it an A if certain plot bits didn't keep nagging at the back of my mind. I mean...it works, don't get be wrong, but there's a couple spots where the logic feels forced.....you'll see what I mean.

As an aside, on the way out of the theater my buddy, my son and I were talking about the movie and i commented that it did well enough that I was sure they would do the sequelitis thing, and predicted that it would be a prequel about the villain, to explain the whole deal (origin story). Then if that does well a third film will come out focusing on the lone surivor kid when he grows up. They announced recently that yes indeed Creggers is going to do a prequel to Weapons next, so I am right on count one.....!

*A thing I know exists because my teen was into it before he was a teen. He and I still argue over whether its really a thing or even a smart way to run, of course. 

The 1st Day of Horror: The Mansion of Madness (1972)

The Mansion of Madness (1972) 

To kick off our first day of 31 Days of Horror, we have a Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray restoration: The Mansion of Madness from 1972! Known as La Mansion De La Locura, directed by Mexican director Juan Lopez Moctzeuma, and based loosely on the Edgar Allen Poe tale "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," this is less of a horror film and more of a sort of weird, 70's style surreal satire, the kind that could only have been produced in that era of film making. 

The story focuses on our protagonist, Gaston LeBlanc, a reporter for an inquiring newspaper sometime in the 19th century as he seeks to investigate the nature of a series of innovative treatments at a remote sanitarium run by the enigmatic Dr. Maillard. As Dr. Maillard takes him on a tour of the maddening facility it becomes apparent that the inmates are running the asylum, and Maillard is the maddest of them all, perhaps. Other characters are woven in, including the woman Eugenie, who is the daughter of the man who previously ran the sanitarium, as well as some hapless allies of LeBlanc who are unable to escape the clutches of the madmen.    

The movie has a number of elements typical of the more experimental (and often foreign) films of the late 60's and 1970s. The perspective of the mad, the nature of madness, the relationship of the insane to those who try to cure them. The further back you go, the more exotic and strange perceptions on psychiatric treatment tended to be, although this movie hardly tries to portend to such matters; the Dr. Maillard of the film is a doctor in name only, and his bizarre method of treatment for his patients is basically to let them do as they will, and to indulge in his own control fantasies in the process. 

One side effect of being a film of its time is that the orchestration for the movie is completely batty. For the time this movie came out one must be mindful that we were still a few years away from John Williams redefining film scores with Jaws and Star Wars, and I imagine that contemporary viewers of the day would be more in tune with the tonal incoherence of the film as dictated by the disjointed choice of music from scene to scene. Some of the music sets a disturbing and menacing mood; other pieces emphasize a unique early seventies take on "the sound of madness" which to today's viewer makes the pieces sound absurdist (and maybe they did then, too). I have to admit, I feel like someone could completely redo the music in this film and get a shockingly different feel out of it as a result. 

All things considered, this isn't a scary movie by any stretch, though it might be a bit disturbing or even just unsettling, though I think deliberately uncomfortable portrayals of madness have been outdone by subsequent films over the decades, making this one feel a bit quaint. At one point I sort of felt like, "This is what the crowd at a free love Ren fair in 1972 looked like if you got them to work as extras on a film set for a couple days," and that's probably not far off the mark.

Choice bits:

Apparently, the director was friends with and influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky, which explains a bit. 

Ellen Sherman, who played Eugenie, was the only American actor in the film.

Check out the third act sequence as the Godiva-like woman on horseback is led through the vast chamber of glass coffins...would love to find out where this was filmed, as it is an excellent visual to steal for a future horror game!

The main protagonists of this film are almost amusingly incompetent in their fighting skills, though they do at some point rally a bit. The basic, almost mundane nature of physical conflict portrayed within the film is oddly refreshing in how "normal" it is, contrasted by the aberrant behavior on parade.

Who Should See This: I would suggest this film is best enjoyed by film viewers into studying that era of film-making from the 70's in particular, and I also think anyone into surrealism in films might enjoy it a bit. I wondered to myself if this was a film a very young David Lynch might have seen early in his budding film career, as certain moments felt like they might have been influential.

Available in restored 35mm from Vinegar Syndrome here. The restoration is actually quite striking, and gives the film an interesting vibrancy that makes it stand out. The greenery of the filmed outdoor locations are especially striking, and many of the set locations are fascinating and suitable locations for depicting the labyrinthine sanitarium.

All in all, a solid C, but with the caveat that this film is meant to be an interesting (albeit not at all contemporary) experience...and may not always feel entertaining so much as perplexing to younger film goers. 

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). 

Realms of Chirak the Setting and Pathfinder 2E

By popular demand my Wednesday group has returned to Pathfinder 2E, now Remastered, and everyone is having a good time. I gave some thought to what setting I would use...I had created the Oman'Hakat world for Pathfinder 2E when the system came out and ran a series of successful campaigns in that world, including one that ran to 20th level. I ran some shorter campaigns in PF2E using Keepers of Lingusia, and even the Enzada campaign, which was the world I designed for Pathfinder 1E when I switched over to that back in the day. I had not, however, used Realms of Chirak.....which I ran a huge number of campaigns for using D&D 3.0, 3.5, 4E and then Pathfinder 1E. I had kept my scenarios and campaigns in Chirak with D&D 5E, but a side effect of that was that I was generally less satisfied with running future games there because of my many issues with the 5th edition mechanics, which were now amplified by the even less satisfying new 2024 5.5 edition. So it was time to merge PF2E with Chirak!

This has led me to realize that I have a lot of work cut out for me, though maybe less in some ways than I might have thought, as specific ancestries in Chirak that do not have proper analogues in Pathfinder 2E will require more extensive write ups with the racial feats and such to provide proper support. Right now I am sort of running these scenarios ad hoc....reskinning appropriate NPC and monster stat blocks to get what I want, and finding the best analogue already in PF2E for players. Eventually I will work up the energy to develop actual ancestry paths for things such as the animates, cannesh, Masirians and so forth, and add in feats to support the gnome/goblin connection stuff like that. If you are unfamiliar with tis setting, I still have an old 4th edition take available out there on Drivethrurpg sites. I have an extensive 5th edition draft that I have run 5E games with for years, but never compiled into a print-worthy document. Now, maybe, I will find my writing spirit again and cough up something for Pathfinder 2E. Who knows! I'd love to feel that inspiration to write hit me again like it did back in the day, though I think it didn't so much leave me as life kind of crumpled it up and shoved it down deep into the couch cushions. It's hard to feel motivated to indulge in such fancies when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you know?

Anyway, I am having fun with this return to Pathfinder, and likewise this return to Chirak. I rolled the timeline forward another 20 years so many of the plots and NPCs the PCs are meeting are now older than their last appearances, and many children of said NPCs are now adults. It will be interesting to watch this develop. Some venerable old PCs who have gone on to become important NPCs will weigh in, and I admit it is a shame I lost touch with some of my old gaming crew, would be fun to have them back again, but life has a way of carrying on....ah well!

As a side note, Friday's biweekly game has wrapped a scenario in Tales of the Valiant (we all enjoyed it, and found it slightly more satisfying than classic 5E, and much more satisfying than the new 2024 5E lite), but we are all eyeing the new Starfinder 2E hungrily now, especially since it is now 100% fully compatible with Pathfinder 2E mechanics....I have the Player Core, GM Core and Galaxy Guide now and I have to say, I like the approach they have taken over all --though I miss a lot of the older art style in the game; a lot of the newer art is just not as dynamic as it used to be from the old core books. The art is still good, though....just not as good as it used to be. Either way, this new edition handily embraces its space fantasy elements and fixes practically everything I had issues with in the prior edition, so I am looking forward to trying it out now.