Still from Die Farbe

Last weekend was the H.P. Lovecraft film festival in Portland Oregon, and although I didn’t manage to get it together and attend the first night, I was able to sneak in without scaring anybody on the second evening.

Here’s a list of the short films that were playing at this event:

Night One

Call of Nature by Rick Tillman
Flush with Fear by Christopher G Moore (site)
Doppelganger by Theo Stefanski (site)
The Ritual by Will Wright (director’s showreel)
Idol Worship by Theo Stefanski (site)
Dirty Silverware by Steve Daniels (trailer, stuff)
Ethereal Chrysalis by Syl Disjonk (site)
Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ by Christopher Saphire (site, trailer)
Apartment Eleven by Mark Player (trailer)

Night Two

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ by Christopher Saphire (site, trailer)
Window Into Time by Thomas Nicol (animated short by same director)
Haselwurm by Eugenio Villani (watch!)
Black Goat by Erik Wilson (watch!, official site)
The Island by Nathan Fisher (watch!)
Static Aeons by Gib Patterson (watch!)
Shadow of the Unnamable by Sascha Renninger (official site)

Also playing were two feature films. These were The Whisperer in Darkness an HPLHS effort directed by Sean Branney (trailer) and Die Farbe (“The Color” in English) (trailer) directed by Huan Vu.

It actually turned out that the sound was off when they tried to play The Raven on the first night, so they played it the second night. The shorts were judged by Guillermo Del Toro, who declared a tie for the winner of the festival. The winners were:

• First Place: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ by Christopher Saphire
• First Place: Static Aeons by Gib Patterson
• Runner Up: Black Goat by Erik Wilson

So the good news is that I got to see all of the shorts that Guillermo Del Toro liked the best.

In The Raven, a man is haunted by the memory of Lenore and his dread and sorrow are personified by (duh) a raven. I really liked this interpretation. Saphire did a great job on everything, especially the mood of the piece.

Window in Time follows a scientist and his shyly amorous lab assistant as they investigate an ancient chemical formula and unlock a horrible evil. This poetic and atmospheric short was my favorite. It had humor, horrible fates awaiting scientists who are investigating things they shouldn’t, and lots of juicy unheeded warnings.

A private hunt for a giant worm, (the Haselwurm) whose meat confers supernatural powers, goes horribly horribly wrong when one of the hunters is bitten and something happens that you’d rather not think about too much.

Man vs Wild meets Lovecraft in Black Goat, not a short but a trailer for a planned feature-length film. A monster hunter with a plan for avoiding certain death at the hands of a Lovecraftian monster. Short. Funny. Poetic. Six minutes!

I’m worried that I’m using the words “poetic” and “atmospheric” too much here. This is the last time, I promise! Despite being difficult to understand most of the time, atmospheric and poetic computer animated short Static Aeons successfully delivers its payload: The End of the World.

What drives the psyche of a man who would lock himself up in a well-stocked backyard bomb shelter, and who would listen to the world end outside as he tries not to go crazy on his tiny Island? Loneliness. Barbarism.

I will give a grudging “I see what you did there” to Shadow of the Unnamable for using a dialogue between two characters to Be The Story. But it didn’t work for me.

The feature that night was a German film, Die Farbe. Based on Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space. The movie is faithful to the basic story, but sets the main events in World War II Germany, and I can’t help but see it now politicized. Horrible things happened to some people: Many people forget (or at least pretend). Some can’t believe something like that would ever happen. Others struggle to forget and fail. A few are driven mad. The movie itself is creepy and… and… atmospheric (sorry) but I found the long slow burn trajectory of the bulk of this film a little tedious. It has one really delicious scene where someone nudges a corpse with a broom. Best use of dust in a movie, ever.

Problem #1: Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall)

Problem #2, Seen Here Being Ignored by Barnabas

The movie very roughly follows the Barnabas Collins book I reviewed not too long ago. Of course, Barnabas originated from the popular gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. Barnabas Collins (played by Jonathan Frid) is awakened by a grave robber, and approaches the Collins family in the guise of a long lost cousin from England. Naturally, before long, all the ladies of the house are fawning over him. For better or for worse, Barnabas falls for a different girl who reminds him of his lost love, Josette (who threw herself off a cliff when she discovered the secret of his curse.)

Most of the characters spend the bulk of the movie unaware that Barnabas is a vampire. The only person who puts two and two together has such an annoying speech affectation that nobody will take him seriously. Dr. Julia Hoffman, however, manages to put the pieces together. Here is her “Aha!” moment:

I see!

It turns out that the good doctor lets her emotions get in the way and devises an antidote to the vampiric cells in the bloodstream of Barnabas Collins. Before long, she is administering shots to Barnabas, who, of course, uses her like a door mat.

Barnabas is in love with Maggie Evans (played by Kathryn Leigh Scott) and the shots the doctor has been giving him allow him to walk around in daylight for the first time in hundreds of years.

Problem #3

Such a cute and seemingly carefree couple. But can Barnabas find true happiness? One would hope so. Now that Barnabas has found his love again, he will stop at nothing to make her his bride. Barnabas is my man. The movie is admittedly kind of a stinker. Netflix doesn’t carry it, and my rat army could only find it in VHS. There are, however, some great atmospheric shots, a lot of bad drama, a dash of fakey medical jargon, some shooting of silver bullets, and a really excellent vampire staking scene.

It just so happens that the folks at The Obscure Hollow have posted some great shots from the movie, and it looks like they got their hands on a better copy of it than I did. So you should go check it out.

Creepy Factor: 2 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 4 out of 5

Final result: Truly, the world should have a taste of the Real Thing before Tim Burton and Johnny Depp give Dark Shadows a try.

Wait! Here is where I use my handy vampire classification system on Carmilla.

• Good Looking: Yes
• Superhuman strength: Yes.
• Changeling: Yes
• Sparkles: No
• Erotic neck biting: Yes!
• Drink blood: Yes
• Can turn victims into more vampires: Yes
• Must be killed by decapitation or stake through the heart: Yes
• Reflection in mirrors: No
• Scared of crosses and/or garlic: No
• Burn in sunlight: Yes
• Goth nightclub visit: No
• Mind control: Yes

Ah! I love classifying vampires.

House of Dark Shadows – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) – 1971
Dark Shadows Soap Opera and Barnabas Collins on Amazon

Thanks for reading another one of my movie reviews. Hopefully next time I review a nice juicy horror novel with loads of Weird Erotic Tension.

Before I get too deep into the review, I have some things I have to make clear:
1) I read Coraline when it came out and enjoyed it.
2) I avoided all the hype about this movie to the point where I refused to read anything about it or watch any of the trailers. I didn’t even know it was in 3D!
3) Thanks to Pixar and Aardman studios I expect BIG things out of animated movies.

The basic story is that Coraline has just moved with her parents into a rental house that also contains some strange neighbors. Coraline is bored with everyday life and feels neglected by her busy parents. While exploring her new house, she ends up discovering a passage to a sort of mirror world where everything is magical and everyone loves her. In the other world there is an “other mother” and “other father.”

The Other Mother (also known as the Beldam) is a very interesting character. In the beginning of the movie, the Other Mother is actually pretty hot, and seems loving and friendly. The Other mother cooks delicious food and does special things for Coraline. But as the movie goes on, the Other Mother changes, and not for the better.

I think the number one problem with this movie (and with the book) is that its baked-in wholesomeness kills the suspense and makes the proceedings inevitable. While it is offbeat and creepy, underneath all that delicious darkness is a cloying After School Special morality-tale flavored sweetness. I was also left wishing we could find out more about the Other Mother. How old is she and what is she really? At the end the Beldam changes into something resembling a spider.

Here are the good things:

It’s in 3D. This made it really fun. There were parts of the movie where people in the theater (including me) were ooh-ing and ah-ing out loud at the cool 3D. Definitely awesome.

It has some insane and magical spectacles. Whenever I see a Pixar movie or something by Aardman Studios (who do the Wallace and Gromit films) there is inevitably some point where I am shocked and amazed at how imaginative and brilliant they are with their medium. With animation, the sky’s the limit. Coraline has several scenes (all orchestrated by the Other Mother) where they really take full advantage of the medium, especially one featuring the crazy neighbors from downstairs in their theater playing a mermaid and Venus from Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” Just brilliant.

It has some darkness. There is a lot of darkness. Rats, rot, and general darkness. For example, the “other father” becomes imbecilic at the end. Half in a sad way and half in a creepy way. If you know me you know I love the dark.

And that’s kind of the way it is. It was good. My friend the Diabolical Doctor Francois liked that one of the main characters was a cat. And this is definitely a movie where if you’re even considering seeing it, you have to have to have to see it in a theater. Otherwise you may as well just not see it. (Update: Go here to download my Papercraft Coraline Doll.)

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 1 out of 5 (unless you’re into old ladies with enormous bosoms in body stockings) Also the Other Mother is kind of hot in a Jan Svankmajer-meets Cruella DeVille way.

Coraline – Based on a book by Neil Gaiman – Directed by Henry Selick – 2009

Purchase Coraline DVDs on Amazon

Don’t miss my central source for information on Coraline: Coraline Central.

I think the filmmakers set out with several common goals. There may be more, but the ones I caught were:

• Use a lot of the same actors in both movies.
• Have both films reference each other in clever ways.
• Express nostalgia for watching old films in theaters.
• As part of the nostalgia use effects to imitate what a film used to look like after it had been shown a lot. So both films use things like scratches, sloppy retitles, and spliced-out parts to look old.

There’s something about sexual politics and emasculation going on in both these movies too, but I decided not to cover that.

Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror

Wow I loved this movie. There are several sub-plots to it but the basic gist is this: A military biological weapons project goes wildly awry and a town in Texas is over-run by zombies who are hungry for brains. The result is suspense, gore, violence, crazy stop-motion effects, and hilarity. Choice moments include:

Horrible Infections Catalogued

…and…

All that pole dancing finally paid off!

I had to edit my list of favorite moments down quite a bit so as not to bore you with screenshots. The moment I keep coming back to in this movie is the part where Dakota, the maybe-lesbian anesthesiologist who is trying to escape her psychopath doctor husband, shares a funny and tender moment with her son, and tells him to be careful with the gun she just gave him (with instructions to shoot his father if he shows up.) She says. “Be careful where you point that thing. You’ll blow your own face off.” Then she gets out of the car and hasn’t made it ten feet before you see a flash from the car and hear the gun go off. I haven’t figured out how, exactly, this scene encapsulates the whole movie, but for me it does. Probably because it takes a horror standard (the wise boy and his panicked, caring mother) and turns it on its ear.

Be careful with that.

I also have to say that I loved how Rodriguez used the “old film” effects in a purposeful manner. There are several choice scenes where the film jitters, develops streaks, warps out of shape, or gets “jammed” and burns through in ways that add depth to the movie. Also, the ending credits are simply beautiful.

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 5 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof

I have to say up front that besides the inevitable Pulp Fiction, I am not a fan of Quentin Tarantino, so for this film I decided to set my baggage aside and give it as fresh a viewing as I could. I had my work cut out for me, it appears, especially because Netflix said I was going to hate it.

Uh Oh. 2.5 stars?

Netflix turned out to be right, but not for the reason I expected. Death Proof is agonizingly long, boring, and stupid. By stupid, I mean that all the dialogue is stupid and everything everyone does is stupid and boring. Tarantino knows how to make an interesting movie with sly dialogue so this turn of events makes me think he set out to make a dull, stupid movie on purpose.

XXXX lap dance = *YAWN*

The dialogue is about who is and isn’t sleeping with who, who is in this month’s fashion magazine, who isn’t drinking and who is (and how much.) The lap dance is boring. Even the final chase scene is rendered impotent by someone yelling the already-tired-in-2007 phrase “tap that ass!” over and over and over and over.

Om Nom Nom Nom

For me the most disturbing part of this movie was watching Stuntman Mike (played by Kurt Russell) eat nachos. Another thing I liked about this film was the Technicolor-like opening credits. Oh – and for some reason I was fascinated when Stuntman Mike put eye drops in his eyes, and then also where he stopped to sneeze but then didn’t. (This may sound like I’m joking but I assure you I’m serious.) See? I found three nice things to say.

Besides the coloring, Tarantino decides to use his “old film” effects almost randomly, and they end up mostly pulling the viewer out of the scene to remind them that they are watching a film, not a movie. Perhaps most annoying to me is that Tarantino decides to pull a Tarkovsky and insert a seemingly arbitrary black and white scene into a color movie. The black and white scene chronicles another several dull minutes at a convenience store.

Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5

Grindhouse – Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez – Dimension Films – 2007

View Planet Terror at Amazon
View Death Proof at Amazon