THE DEMON

THE DEMON

The Demon was created in a supernatural dimension where Halloween was actually filmed and produced in South Africa.  I can imagine the theatres were packed during its theatrical run and it subsequently inspired a slew of other South African slasher films.  It plays all the same cat and mouse, stalker-in-the-background games as Halloween and features a faceless killer that is described as an inhuman demon by his “Ahab” (Cameron Mitchell), but as it is from another dimension there are many key differences.  The demon wears gloves with razor tipped points but many times he chooses to choke his victims or body slam them rather than stabbing them.  I could only imagine that he chose to suffocate people rather than stab them to death because in this supernatural otherworld metal is really, really flimsy.  The claws must have been made out of the equivalent of aluminum, but I can’t really be sure.  Cameron Mitchell plays a psychic Sherlock Holmes (ironic if you know the Halloween series), but his tele-pathetic powers end up boiling down to smelling pillows and drawing shitty pictures and getting shot in the face.  There’s an odd subplot involving a budding courtship between two minor characters that might eat up too much screen time if you’re a picky sissy pants; I thought it paid off in adding a certain emotional weight to their subsequent deaths at the gnarled hands of the demon.  I was almost sad to see them go.

Scenes come from nowhere and pop and fizzle out of existence.  There’s a club named Boob’s Disco.  Gratuitous nudity and awkward, almost completely nonsensical cuts round the whole shebang out.  Written and directed by the immortal Percival Rubens, whom I’m sure is a big name in dimension-X, be sure to pop this bloke into a rusty old VCR on a rainy day if you want Halloween but tire of convention. 

         

Humanoids from the Deep

Hope all you crusty cretins out there enjoyed some of the HALLOWEEN 2 slop I had to offer from the crypt.  I'm dragging up some B-grade reviews from the icy abyssal depths of the ocean for your viewing pleasure...hope the season of rot is treating you all well. 

HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP

The creature rise; a hulking mass of seaweed and entangled hermit crabs, it throws its head back gurgling slime and salt through a thousand unseen gills, its struggled breathing sounding like a scuba respirator full of sludge, and you can see in wide mouthed horror the fin stretch, the dark thin skin between expand, the twisting veins pumping dark blood in this fold of flesh is backlit by the gleaming moonlight, and this impossible monster becomes real.  Before it was too silly to consider, a child’s nightmare, something the adult mind can’t spend time seriously pondering, there were other things to worry about ,like taxes, gossiping neighbors, your bank account, whose your friend and who isn’t your friend; adult matters, no time to entertain fancies of magic fairies, or Santa Claus, or sea monsters.  But here it is, like an exclamation point negating everything you thought you knew, and your final thoughts as it digs it’s black claws, black as plaque, into your neck, severing your arterial vein, is how absurd it is, to be killed by something that can’t exist…..

From the cold and smothering black depths of cinematic depravity comes a movie unashamed to deliver the creature gore that gushing red blooded horror freaks truly relish. Humanoids from the Deep is a Corben flick that delivers all the scaly, slithery, slimy mayhem your eyes can suck up into your cortex. Plus the crux of the plot centers around fish-men raping chicks; mull over that one in your scrub tub late at night.

The story takes place in a sleepy fishing community where a big bad corporation is coming in to give everyone jobs at a newly proposed fish hatching plant. A local Native American sees through this ploy, notices the subtle changes in the wildlife, like dead dogs and giant humanoid fish men, so naturally he opposes this plant. There's a lot of conflict between him and a bunch of racist rednecks, leading to wacky black and blue brawls where uppercuts go "bamf" and have the heavy sound of bare knuckle punching raw meat, but that soon takes a backseat to the real issue at hand; mermen are raping their women and by golly they got to do something about it. The cool headed main goody two shoes fisherman and main protagonist Jim, sides with the Indian after he sees some evidence indicating something is amok. They team with a hot body scientist named Dr. Drake (these type of flicks always have a beautiful babe biologist, don't they?), who seems to know a little bit too much about these new creatures. After locating a hive of the humanoids and filling it with buckets of bullets and spear gun darts, they retrieve a fish monster cadaver and one of their recent rape victims, a girl who is still covered in fresh humanoid man spunk. Dr. Drake ends up revealing that the new plant, or cannery, is the source of these creatures, and that they are attracted to big tittied buxoms. Naturally. This sets the stage for the sea men's big offensive push out of the water and on to land at an annual carnival. Chaos ensues, women are taken as sex slaves, men are made into sushi, but eventually the people rally together and repel the onslaught of horny amphibians.

The humanoids are sufficiently slimy, there’s a bodacious boob count, and the gore is on par with slow decapitations, face rips, and torso tears; this has the right mix o' cheese to keep most B-flixsters happy. I love how un-reactive, and stone faced everyone in this film seems to be after discovering what could be the find of a century. It's all dealt with in such a matter of fact manner that it makes me wonder how many times monsters from the ocean venture to this place to inseminate some poor lady, so obviously the acting is pretty much what you'd expect given the type of flick this is. I really dug this slop. Anything that capitalizes on the fear of rape with creatures from the murky depths of the ocean should be checked out at least once.

Halloween 2: rare pics

Some rare Halloween 2 pics I've yoked....

Halloween 2: The Novel

The Halloween 2 novelization by Jack Martin is a worthy item for any collector or fan of the film.  The descriptions of Haddonfield around Halloween really took me away to the icy steel air of October.  The candy wrapper strewn gutters and the cold pale moon pitched high in the sky; beaming its indifferent face in all directions and nowhere all at once, all of these things really sucked me into the moment and perfectly encapsulated that atmosphere of a typical autumn night in suburbia as described in the text.  The novelization is also of particular interest to fans because it includes entire sequences cut from the film that, in my humble opinion, makes the story flow in a more logical progression.  It details how Michael kills the electrical power to the hospital (thus answering those nipping questions about why it’s so dark in the hospital during the film), and it also includes the death of a new reporter only briefly seen during the film.  The death of the reporter also ties into how The Shape enters the hospital, which is slightly different than what is shown in the film.  The novel does a good job of adding a layer of extra characterization to cast, fleshing out the players before they shed blood at the hand of The Shape.  The ending is also slightly different; reconciling the fact that her life is completely different following the events of that Halloween night, Laurie tells the ambulance driver, upon asking where to drop her off, that she truly didn't know.  Her life has been turned inside out and upside down...she feels homeless and off center and those additional lines at the end demonstrate that.

 I highly recommend this book, it’s cheap and relatively easy to track down, and the text is easily readable and flows fast.  Even after watching this movie all these years I can find extra things to take note of or think about while watching Halloween 2 and his book only multiplied what I saw or thought about during the film.  Definitely a good purchase for the Halloween nut.

Halloween 2: Scaring up some observations...

 Halloween 2

 Beware for beyond lies spoilers....

Halloween 2 has recently come out on BOO-ray, scaring up sInematic musings from my trash entrenched mind.  Halloween 2 is sugary slashtastic fun; although the film is a direct follow up to the original Halloween, taking place during the same night, I consider the two separate, stand alone films with entirely different styles.  The original’s meaning changes when bounced against the revelation that Laurie is actually Michael’s sister.  The revelation implies different things that the film makers never anticipated when committing the film to that white hot light coming out of the projector, thus it is better to consider the movies separate.  Even the continuity from the onset of the film is inconsistent from the ending of the original; Michael falls from a different room in the house and the gun shots are miscounted.  When considering Halloween 2 one must keep these ideas in mind, and view the sequel as the series first foray into franchise territory, where the original was created with the intention of a stand alone film, ending with the boogeyman’s whereabouts “Unknown City, anywhere-town USA”.

 

Ben Tramer and Omens of the Future

By watching Ben Tramer die, engulfed in flame, was Dr. Loomis seeing a future vision of the demise of The Shape at the end of the film? Maybe not, but it does make a lot of sense when considering Loomis’s speech about the festival of Samhain and the made up Pagan tradition of burning criminals and outcasts in baskets to receive visions of the future.  Ben Tramer (the very person Laurie said she had a secret crush on in the original film, singing to herself as The Shape watches from the shadows “I wish I had you all alone, just the two of us”); is even dressed up as the Shape.   This kind of alluding to future events happens again in the story when Michael suffocates the nurse in the hot tub by bobbing her head in and out of the scolding water after overhearing her talking about how she would never bob for apples again for as long as she lived.  Irony is one of the Shape’s strong points; in another scene the Shape, the living embodiment of evil and death, a modern day grim reaper, chooses to hide in the hospital’s maternity ward, standing over rows of innocent newborn babies.   It’s apparent that the film makers intended for Michael’s actions to be deviously ironic, like a good trick or treat prank.

Both Ben Tramer and Myers die by fire and Dr. Loomis gives a completely made up explanation about what happens during Samhain.   Dr. Loomis’s talk about witches and ancient Pagan ritual sounds spooky, but it is done with a greater intention within the context of the movie, it connects the Shape to the holiday, and eludes to the fact that Myers is more conscious about what is happening around him than a mere madman motivated by pure instinct.  The connection between Loomis’s speech about Hallow’s Eve and what happens at the end of the film is undeniable and definitely adds another layer of complexity to the story that most people seem to miss.  A point that Dr. Loomis doesn’t seem to miss however is that “2,000 years later we’ve come no further”; we are still as superstitious as our Celtic ancestors from long ago.  Despite being a man of science Dr. Loomis recognizes “pure evil” and speaks of Myers as if he were a mystical force.  He simply isn’t human.  Loomis abandons pure scientific endeavor and must rely on superstition to explain Myer’s existence.   

I don't think that the audience sees these connections right away because at the end of the film you aren't thinking about what Loomis said twenty minutes ago. You're thinking about Laurie and Dr. Loomis getting away and eradicating the threat of the Shape, but when you take the movie in as a whole it makes sense and explains why the writers (or writer John Carpenter), would make up some false explanation of Samhain.

Alice

Why did Myers kill Alice?  She was not in his way to getting to the hospital, so what was the point (besides padding the body-count?).

 

Alice was a nubile teenage girl (much like Judith), alone in her house on Halloween, the cops were on Myers trail, he was already switching up some of his MO with the infamous Bob kill from H1, why not toss another body on the pile to really toss the police off? When they start finding bodies in household after household on the same street they will start seeing Michael "on every street corner", which fits perfectly with the Ben Tramer death and might also explain part of the reason he broke into the elementary school to etch “Samhain” in blood. 

Myers turned his attack on Laurie into an attack on Haddonfield itself. He wanted the police jumping at their own shadows, spreading the police force out thin in a panic, leaving The Shape free to pursue his own dark intentions. Alice's death was a means to an end. He needed the police shaken up enough to start running over their own citizens in patrol vehicles. That sick irony is something Myers thrives on.

Dr. Mixter

I enjoyed the fact that Myers used a syringe to kill him after his last scene was with Laurie, tapping her vein, drawing her blood with a needle. Nobody taps Laurie but Michael. How Freudian.  The shower represents purification, like the "baptizing" shower from Psycho. Dr. Mixter never made it to his shower. He was never absolved of his sins, or at least his drunkenness.

Blood on Black

While Laurie dreams in her drug induced nightmare, recalling memories long buried in her psyche, perhaps shaken loose from the night’s terror, we are shown intercut shots of blood splattering against a flat, black surface, like crimson tears in a void.  The terror of remembering is a powerful, sometimes terrifying thing, and perhaps on some sort of animalistic level Laurie felt her repressed memories and nightmares boiling to the surface of her psyche after suffering from the shock of being attacked by The Shape, whom through musical cues is also alluded to as “Mr. Sandman” in the film.

The very first thing Laurie tells any hospital personnel is to not put her asleep.  On the surface it would appear that she wouldn’t want to sleep out of fear of Myers attacking her in her vulnerable state as she slept, but if you interpret the “Mr. Sandman” song by The Cordettes as an allusion to Michael Myers (within the context of the film), then Laurie’s fear of sleep takes on a duplicate meaning.  She not only is fearful of the vulnerability associated with sleep, she is afraid of seeing “Mr. Sandman”, or Michael Myers in her sleep, a fear that is soon realized when recollecting the time she first saw him in Smith’s Grove Sanitarium during a nightmare.  As the jagged memories come flowing back to consciousness and Laurie recalls her relation to pure evil, the spots of blood on black becomes a still lake of blood, perhaps representing the nightmare struggle she finds herself drowning in.  It’s interesting to note that the next time she sees Myers (or anyone for that matter) she’s drugged and dazed, her sight unclear, the Shape appears to her as if in a vision, offering a fresh kill for his muse, further eradicating any sense of security Laurie might have. 

The blood on black lake is revealed to be from the slow bleeding of Mrs. Alves.  The same blood is what Jimmy later slips in and bumps his noggin; makes sense, after all Jimmy was always slipping up around Mrs. Alves…..     

Regan finds a new home in the Crypt

As you can probably surmise, this crappy Crypt-keeper is absolutely coo-coo clock for Halloween decor, and after a quick trip to the local curios shop I returned with Captain Spaulding from THE EXORCIST; completely pea soup splattered in all her spinning head glory.

Demon possession is so grand, I can't wait until it becomes the cool thing to do. 

Finally got down with some Halloween 2, BOO-ray action.  Love the candy coated hi definition color, but am not so happy about the credits switcheroo at the beginning.  The crypt space will be filled with Halloween 2 black mass worship all week, so keep peaking here for some gushy Halloween movie love....  

Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride

Over the weekend I felt the itch; the itch for voluptuous lesbo vampire broads, old dilapidated mansions that go creek in the night, Dracula spouting the dark poetry of the damned, and hellish experimentation performed by some mad German doctor....in other words I felt the itch that could only be scratched by HAMMER.  So I laid back in my easy chair and dosed my brain with some dusty classic vampire yarns, such as Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride.


Dracula is sick of the game.  Yes sick.  And the damned creature wants out of it.  He's sick of monster hunters separating his coffin lid in the throes of a good midday nap, he's tired of feeding the vampire chicks chained to his coffin, he's sick of humanity mucking it up for him.  It's time for the dark days; the all or nothing days.  It's time for the apocalypse, the big end game, and with the help of some hypnotized higher up British officials and a brand new strand of the bubonic plague, aka the Black Death, he seems closer to ever to bringing the world to the end, if it weren't for that meddling Van Helsing standing in his way...

Peter Cushing and Christoher Lee mix it up in this classic HAMMER sinema great, and with this being Christopher Lee's last Dracula flick, it makes me wonder if the whole deal about Dracula being tired of living had some other implications, like Mr. Lee was tired of playing the living dead, even though it's a FACT that nobody on Earth can bulge their bloodshot eyes out of their skull in hyno-Dracula trance like he can.   There's some political intrigue, actually it wasn't as intriguing as a chore to sit through until the movie got to the classic HAMMER stuff, but I'd recommend it if you're looking for a good vamp flick that doesn't make vampires look like cry baby emo goth kids. 

Bereavement

I just saw the follow up to Malevolence a few days ago. I think I'll have to watch it a few more times before doing a full blown review, but right now I'm thinking Bereavement > Malevolence. It's a sprinkle of TCM, a dabble of Psycho, with a dash of stalk and slash. Nothing anybody here has never seen before, but I thought it came together nicely with some dark twists at the end and a journey into the psychosis of a madman that will unnerve the tame. The most compelling part of the story for me was the utter tragedy of all the people involved, everyone is fucked from the first frame. It’s more than another dead teen flick; it deals more with the nature of tragedy, how in an instance someone can come along and take away everything you know and care about, and the impression violence and evil has on the development of a child’s psychological makeup.  Malevolence showed us the boogeyman Martin Bristol would later become; Bereavement sets the table in a way that doesn’t insult the viewer’s logic.

A child (Martin Bristol) afflicted with a rare disease, one that prevents the young boy from feeling pain, is kidnapped from his backyard swing in a scenario that would give any warm blooded parent a serious case of the heebie jeebies.  Later the same child is subjected to psychological and physical torture that would break the resolve of full grown men.  The movie seems to suggest that Martin’s nerve affliction helped him survive the trials of the madman he’s held captive by, but the psychological damage done to him is irreversible.  Nurture and nature have equal play in his development, but due to the perfect storm of tragic circumstance he becomes a living ghost, unfettered by the morals of modern society; Martin is a silent stalking killer, a moon faced boogeyman, and his “father”, his cruel captor, seems proud of his son before Martin swiftly buries an ax into his chest. And why not…he has become a twisted reflection of his own lunatic teachings…keeping a legacy of evil alive that had begun with his father..

Some might call this a torture porn, but that’s really not the case.  There was one scene that displays torture that goes far beyond psychological; but I believe the movie was just playing to the conventions of the genre.  You have to add a little visceral punch to your product when you wear influences like TCM, Psycho, and Halloween on your sleeve; the rest of the “torture” is purely mental, like in a Buffalo Bob from Silence of the Lambs kind of way.     

 

Midnight Movie - book review from the abyss

 

Midnight Movie is a story narrated through interviews, internet blogs, news stories, a splashy diarrhea laden media dump in a documentary style format, no doubt retreading the same tone as Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s pseudo-documentary style; siphoned through a tangled narrative about a mysterious zombie outbreak which supposedly had been caused by the screening of a "lost" Tobe Hooper classic Destiny Express.  Hooper plays a major role in the action along with several other fictional or mostly fictional characters (I’m unsure if some of the people he refers to in the novel were cooked up by Tobe and co-writer, as the novel is semi-autobiographical of Tobe’s own life). The zombies, instead of being the brain hungry, mindless, shambling creatures popularized by Romero’s ilk are sex crazed fiends; Hooper (and co-writer) were going for a different kind of id, one that spews blue cum and generally acts like a hyper sex crazed teen that will literally fuck itself to death.  If this had been a movie it’d resemble a Southern fried, low budget take on The Crazies mixed with a dash of Necromantic while borrowing elements from The Ring told through media breaks and talking heads, all underlined in Hooper’s dry devil-may-care sense of humor.

What I enjoyed most about the story had nothing to do with the story at all, it was reading into some of Tobe's own inner monologue, dialogue which sometimes caters to nerdgasming slashheads like yours truly, that got my goat and I suspect is the main pull for many people purchasing the book.  The characters in the novel are just as eccentric as some of the characters in his quirkier movies (think Eaten Alive) and there’s certainly an effort made to entertain above all else even if the horror is reduced to the slapstick over the top antics of some splatter flicks; tongue planted firmly through the cheek.  The mystery surrounding the outbreak kept me going as the clues were evenly spread throughout the book, revelations came to the reader at a satisfying pace, although I pretty much guessed the true catalyst for the outbreak from the onset.

Where the novel falters is in its inability to remain focused and tonally consistent. One of the main themes in the book is about how society easily sheds its cultural center when faced with a crisis; going through denial of said crisis then spinning the narrative of events to cartoonish extremes to sate the sensibilities of the public.  Catch phrases are attached to terrifying events to rob the tragedy of its horrible power to spread fear, to reshape perceptions, to loosen the control of society.  When the zombie outbreak happens the government steps in to erase the digital footprint of related events and information from the internet and by blaming the incidents on meth heads.  The result is a society that seemingly continues to plod on with horse blinders on, dealing with the menace by internalizing the events in rose colored glasses, or by plain denial.  People continue with their 9 to 5 as best as they can while dealing with these crazy people spewing blue slime out of their pee holes.  There is only a general sense that something is amidst, something is wrong with the country, but like Tobe Hooper says, when isn’t there something wrong?  He’s not even aware of the outbreak until it literally knocks on his front door. 

However later in the novel people begin reacting to the threat of the rising zombie menace by locking themselves into their own homes or leaving town all together as violence escalates in the cities.  The streets are described as dust strewn and clogged with rolling tumbleweeds, deserted and ghostly with the foreboding sense that the infected could be anywhere.  When the threat is dealt with and reversed society reconvenes back to a seemingly normal state of affairs as if the screw happy zombies were but a bump in the natural progression of civilization, a temporary throwback hardly marked in the history books to be trivialized by later generations.  If the threat caused society to lose its cultural center how did it find it again?  It’s unclear and inconsistently presented in the book; it’s hard to imagine a culture that would ignore the zombies on such a large scale, a government capable of hiding the threat as easily as it had in the book in the age of the superhighway of information, and people’s uneven reaction to it.  It’d be hard enough to censor social networks, none the less silence the entire interwebs.  The book doesn’t focus long on the aftermath; it seems satisfied in its conclusion of the story as an entertainment piece but does nothing to address the themes presented and subsequently abandoned through the novel, none of the narrative threads seemed to knot together evenly at the end with the exception of recounting the fate of all the major players.  If it had something definitive to say the crux was lost in Hooper’s staunch musings about Hollywood and the gross-out antics of the zombies.  The novel slides between observations about the meta-culture and oozing orifices; a jubilee of nihilism and amorality run amok while examining the ugly social trends of a media saturated world.        

The third act of the novel shifts focus from the sprawling zombie apocalypse to Hooper’s mission to recreate the amateur shoestring budget movie that is suspected to have kick started the whole humping deadhead epidemic.  Exhausted, flying on fumes and guided by intuition, Hooper decides to remake the film Destiny Express gambling that whatever black cinema magic might had spawned from original could by undone by filming another. Again it’s difficult to see the underlining message when the passages are riddled with road kill and the narrative thread is broken by idiotic tweets and blog passages by chicks with the blue goo with unstable libidos.  Perhaps there’s something to be said about movie remakes robbing or dampening the magic of the original, but that seems kind of pedestrian.    

All in all I couldn't recommend this to anyone that isn't a gushing Tobe Hooper fan.  The day I read this book I was bed ridden, suffering from a summer plague during a stiffening heat wave, with Lifeforce, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Eaten Alive playing on the cathode ray throughout the morning and afternoon hours. The only breaks I had were to spill some fluids in the bathroom, either from pissing or puking.  Bow to the porcelain goddess.  Zombie films seem so much more pertinent when your sick and suffering, but the Tobe Hooper love-fest did little to help elevate the material in the novel and my enjoyment of it.  Buy at your own risk.  This is a library loaner for sure.

R.I.P RALPH the fish

HALLOWEEN 2 on BOO RAY!

We're buzzing (with plague carrying fleas) about the new Halloween 2 blu-ray coming out September 13th here in the crypt.  The old VHS tape is looking rather dog eared from viewing the movie ritualistically through the 3 decades since it's been unleashed on the human herd, as the film is a template for sugary slasher movie fun and one of Cropsy Cryptkeeper's personal cream of the crap picks.

I'm expecting Bereavement to hit the post box sometime soon, so expect a review to the follow up to Malevolence shortly.  I'm hoping it will be just as slashtastic, if not better and darker than the first.  Working diligently on soaking up as much slime as possible in the pages of the new fanzine.  Thank you everyone who contributed to its evil resolve.  Until next time, keep on ROTTING!