A big fat slippery steamy art dump...

MALEVOLENCE!

MALEVOLENCE

February 1^st, 1989; six year old Martin Bristol is kidnapped by a murdering madman.  Taken to a dilapidated meat packing plant, the boy  is forced to watch the unspeakable crimes.....and as the years go by the young man is eventually forgotten…whereabouts unknown…..another face on a milk box with an unhappy ending…..

Ten years later, fleeing from a botched bank robbery, a group of desperate felons take refuge in a seemingly abandoned house, but little do they know the previous tenant hasn’t left, and the hunt is about to begin…  

Malevolence is throw-back stalk and slash done with finesse; it takes it’s time, sets the table, then smashes the fine China into pieces.  It doesn’t jam to the thrill-a-minute hyper kinetic horror of post modern cinema, and it has the flavor of someone who is more into John Carpenter than music videos.  It doesn’t have any of that post-Scream slasher self referential nonsense and it doesn’t feature a score by some one hit wonder band with too much hair gel and too little talent.  It is old school like Atari, but it’s not here to shovel it down your gaping maw.  Can you deal with that Jack? 

Where there isn’t a high body count, or outlandish amounts of B&G (blood and guts…derrrr), there is a focus on suspense and building a sense of mounting dread, and for the most part I think it worked.  The slow moving camera, the eerie resonance of ambient synthesizers, and minimalist use of contrast and light kept me ogling on to the very end.  There were even a few moments where father creepsters icy cold fingers ever so gently grazed my spine, exciting that tingling fury of fear I love so much, the most notable instance being the attic scene towards the end, where the light from a “final girl’s” flash light follows the killer as he slowly descends upon her, making it a point not to rush on the frightened animal before him, taking his time, savoring the moment.  Michael Myers has a distant cousin, a brother of a different mother, and (spoiler) his name is Martin Bristol.  There’s also the rather Freudian murder scene where the killer bends over one of his would be victims in front of him, stabbing her over and over again in a flurry of death dealing knife strokes.  As her eyes glaze over in the cold embrace of her demise the camera frames the killers head as it twitches rapidly.  I’ll leave it up to the dear reader to decide whether or not he stained the inside of his coveralls, if you get my gutter-minded drift down the drain.

Malevolence might get mixed reviews for its sometimes lethargic pace, cast of mostly unsympathetic bank robbers, and low body count, but I found it to be one brutal brew for diehard slash-heads.  It’s a slow burn homage to the horror greats, add a pinch of TCM here (Texas Chainsaw Massacre…derrr) a dabble of Halloween there, some punching synthesizers to highlight the jump scares, a slow moving silent-as-a-graveyard killer, and you got me hooked by the rib cage.  If you’re a fan of the yesteryear slasher scene, then scare up some money for Malevolence…and be on the lookout for the 2 sequel/prequels coming out….I can’t wait!   

I always wanted to be a werewolf

I want to be a werewolf when I grow up...

Watching THE HOWLING and various other werewolf flix.  Hope all ye ghouls out there are enjoying these dog days of summer!

The Funhouse blog...

Check it!  It made me instantly want to love all over The Funhouse!
http://tobehooperfunhouse.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-04-29T23%3A48%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=2

and then afterward....

Cropsy stirs...

 

One day Cropsy woke up from a fever whiskey dream to come face to face with the death itself, or at least, something like death.  Little candles lit up the skeletal empty eye sockets giving it a sinister look, like some decaying  black pumpkin rotting on a porch, long over looked since Hallow’s Eve.  It stunk of festering  flesh, rancid black meat oozed and dribbled off the cranium, melting like a black candle all over Cropsy’s bed.  In a rush of panic he batters at the severed head before him, flailing like so many campers he had scared senseless in the past.  Cropsy was a cruel man, mean spirited, he had this evil way of looking at people, and he took great pride in frightening campers half to death.  Only this time it was he who was the butt of the joke…he would be scared half to death…he who would feel the final wraith of all those tormented children….

The shed erupts into flames…a living inferno…the fire dances across his frame as he looks on in wide eyed terror…it’s waltz brings pain…a baptism by flame…it transmogrifies…devouring flesh….a hellish mutation most grotesque…whittles away the man until there is man no more…whittles him down…like sharpening garden sheers….it eats at man until only animal remains…the pain renders his mind to pieces....until there is only one thought…one emotion that drives this hollowed out husk of a man…REVENGE…must have REVENGE….

And under the cool, carbon scorched earth of Camp Blackfoot…beneath the screeching bats singing their ancient nocturnal songs…in a sea of darkness…he waits…

SLEDGEHAMMER!!!

SLEDGEHAMMER

 A secluded house...a brutal legacy...a sledgehammer...

SledgeHammer is early 80’s shot on video slasher sludge; the first in an era where the introduction to the video camera and the marvel of VHS meant that dollar store nightmares could now be realized for the first time on cassette if you had the guts and grit to make it happen.  Sledgehammer is someone’s digital dream made eternal; like a fly trapped in petrified amber for millennium.  Come share in that dream.  The 80’s had some of the best made for video action that meant home viewing satisfaction.  It was a time where horror movies weren’t played out exercises in self awareness and in references.  These films stood with their feet planted firmly in their own little depraved, illogical universes, and by golly, some of these productions seemed to have the attitude that they could hold their own against the big studios.  There’s a certain fuck all quality to that, that makes it all the more endearing to a spook seeker.

Sledgehammer will pound your sense of taste into dust and your patience into paste.  It’s an hour and a half of slow motion meltdown, people partying HARD, and mutilation by the pound, pound, POUND!  The film opens with a woman locking her kid in the closet so she can get freaky.  Here we are treated to our first taste of the fore mentioned slow motion meltdown.  The camera focuses on the lock slowly closing, then the mother walking away from the door, and then it meanders in a static shot of the plain white door for another 30 seconds.  This should impress upon thy view with a certain sense that the dramatic is happening, or rather, that the door is pretty damn important to the plot of this plucky video trash that could.  Later we learn that the door is where the ghostly apparition of the kid emerges (and transforms into a frizzy haired adult with a translucent mask…wait a minute…is that Shelly from Friday the 13^th part 3, or was Shelly inspired by this kooky spookster???) to delve out sledgehammer justice, but I can’t help but think the door is even more important than that.  Sure the kid from the beginning is locked inside until he dies, but the fact that they carry through the same slow motion shot twice (once to show it happening in the present, once to show a flashback of the kid getting locked in), makes me think the door is actually more important than what the film lets on.

 I think it’s a magic closet.  I think that within its confines are some sort of supernatural crossroads, a video dead vortex leading into an 8th dimension, probably the same one Blood Lake lives in.  It’s somewhere on the way to Friday the 13^th part 3.  It’s just before limbo, somewhere north of the Leviathan.  How else does the pissed off poltergeist armed with a sledgehammer appear so shortly after the child is locked in the closet originally in the beginning of the film?  What does it mean that the killer repeatedly comes out of the closet when one of the later party goers is questioning her boyfriend’s attraction to women? 

After the mother and lover are massacred by a sledgehammer wielding assailant flash forward some years and its party time!  A group of stocked and ready to rock party goers take up the same condo to spend a nice, quiet, secluded weekend of getting absolutely hammered, if not by some kind of ghostly, supernatural kill machine then by Mr. Jack Daniels and Sir Pabst Blue.  There isn’t as much straight talking head dialogue as there is party chanting and pieces of side conversation the audience just happens to pick up.  It actually works well to bring the audience into the scene; it’s like a party where everyone is having a blast except for you, people are way too wasted, and you can’t find one reasonable person to converse with.  There’s a food fight, beer cans get ripped apart, a séance, and before you know it the sledgehammer killer is working his way through the ranks, meat pasting anybody dumb enough to leave the safety of the party for another area of the house (which seems to be just one long white hallway, a white bedroom, and a plain Jane all white living room…THX-1138 set designer?).  The stalk scenes in the film are basically cat and mouse around a coffee table.      

Against all logic and sensibility I loved the hell out of Sledgehammer.  The worse offense any movie can have against it is being a snore, and despite the dangerous use of slow motion for grueling lengths of reel time I found myself interested in the movie from beginning to end.  It never tries to be more than an entertaining cheap as dirt, stalk and vivisect video curiosity and it even had me laughing at a few scenes.  Anybody who doesn’t giggle at the séance scene were the camera slowly pans around the group, each face frozen  in shock and awe until passing the one guy with the speed freak crazy eyes and the shit gobbling grin, shouldn’t waste their time watching barf bag cinema.  Read a book about the mating habits of prairie gofers or something instead.  This movie had me floating happily in a warm sea of synthesizers.  There’s enough hemoglobin splashed around to keep you crimson loving freaks on a leash (even the ghost bleeds!) and the translucent faced slasher is unique enough to separate from other creep show killers.  Intervision done us good.  Seek it out you sick suckfaced freaks, and become a full fledged SLEDGEHEAD like your uncle CRISPY!

The FOG

11:55, almost midnight. Enough time for one more story. One more story before 12:00, just to keep us warm. In five minutes, it will be the 21st of April. One hundred years ago on the 21st of April, out in the waters around Spivey Point, a small clipper ship drew toward land. Suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. For a moment, they could see nothing, not a foot in front of them. Then, they saw a light. By God, it was a fire burning on the shore, strong enough to penetrate the swirling mist. They steered a course toward the light. But it was a campfire, like this one. The ship crashed against the rocks, the hull sheared in two, mars snapped like a twig. The wreckage sank, with all the men aboard. At the bottom of the sea, lay the Elizabeth Dane, with her crew, their lungs filled with salt water, their eyes open, staring to the darkness. And above, as suddenly as it come, the fog lifted, receded back across the ocean and never came again. But it is told by the fishermen, and their fathers and grandfathers, that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the men at the bottom of the sea, out in the water by Spivey Point will rise up and search for the campfire that led them to their dark, icy death.