October Horrorfest 2022 and Irish Jesus in Fairview on Monday Morning Diary (October 24)

by Sam Juliano

The manuscript for the 153,000 word Irish Jesus in Fairview will be sent on to my first-stage editor, Rob Bignell, first thing Tuesday morning, along with my initial payment.

Jamie Uhler’s continuing October Fest Horror project, brilliantly considers ten (10) films this week.

Event Horizon (P. W. S. Anderson… 1997) sci-fi horror

A film I’d seen in the theaters, but not since, was pressed into service in an attempt to cleanse the taste in my mouth and reestablish my appreciation of Laurence Fishburne; after a run-through of the Matrix franchise to get ready for December’s release of Matrix: Resurrections, I’d felt quite fatigued. It’s a franchise that after the great first film and the 2 or 3 great set pieces in the second, more or less becomes quite a slog to get through, and while this is nothing on Fishburne’s Morpheus, or any of the principle players really, they’re just films that become quite laborious to actually sit and watch. Deep Cover, the magnificent 90’s Neo-noir also helped (for those keeping extra score at home, 2009’s somewhat entertaining Armored was also screened), but given my year long commitment to watching Horror and penning the capsule here and there to have a sufficient backlog of reviews done once fall rolled around, I figured a rewatch of Event Horizon necessary.

Much has been said of its overt similarities to the Alien aesthetic, that is to say a plot involving a space crew in deep space either happens upon or is actively searching for a lost ship to only get an alien intruder aboard that slowly works to brutalize all involved. I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence as a cinephile to point out that Alien was itself merely a link in the chain, Ridley Scott’s film borrowed on a well established sci-fi cinematic trope; It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and a 1975 Doctor Who episode (‘The Ark in Space’) chief among them. Plus, from the barest of production values, filmmakers Curtis Harrington (Queen of Blood, 1966) and Mario Bava (Planet of the Vampires, 1965) have also claimed Ridley’s film had their works on his mind during production*. But this also misses another point that Event Horizon and Alien share, how much they leap from science fiction into the world of slasher Horror, the Agatha Christie Ten Little Indians idea where characters are knocked off one by one until just one remains. Halloween then, which arrived a year before Alien, to a boatload of cash seems as important a precursor to them as any 1950’s B-sci-fi work. But then Event Horizon builds a loop, almost becoming a precursor to how Ridley Scott eventually saw the Alien franchise playing out. His human-robot character David (played with brilliant touches by Michael Fassbinder) being the real conduit to the Horror of the world is much like Sam Neill’s Doctor Weir here, who once he finds the Event Horizon, the lost spaceship he helped design to create black holes for light year interspace travel in seconds, is willing to let the dark forces of another dimension control the ship.

The films final third becomes mostly a graphic gore display that I didn’t entirely mind, but I also can’t say that it’s earlier lofty promises were delivered upon either. The story goes that the film as originally envisioned was to land between 2 hours to 2 hours and ten minutes, but the studio took over and exacted a sprinting 96 minute one. Once the film did pretty good in home DVD sales they had an about face and asked for that director’s cut, to only be thwarted given that footage was now gone or would need extensive re-shoots or digital effects overlays. In watching it last night, I liked it enough, but I wonder how much clearer and deeper the premise would be in that extended run-time. It’d allow the interesting ideas of the spinning magnetic portal to better assert itself, placing the gore stuff secondary which I’d imagine would be the proper ordering of thematic subtext. But still, as it stands, it’s not a terrible way to spend a brisk evening, it’s better than you remember.

*It’s a point so vital I thought it serious enough to write a piece on years ago. (https://attractivevariance.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/concerning-the-production-value-derived-opinion-in-the-science-fiction-film/)   

Prey (D. Trachtenberg… 2022) action sci-fi horror

Prey, the latest in the now 5 film deep Predator film franchise (7 if we include the crossover Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem dreck), was a film that initially offered an interesting, offbeat premise when its initial trailer was released online. Apparently the Predators are a race that not only span time, but have technologically evolved relatively little in our humanly earth terms. Meaning, if you imagined the human race of 1719 North America, it’d be a collection of humans living in relatively primal terms with Native American’s moving further and further west due to white Europeans pushing them via new developments of gun powder, muskets and flintlock pistols. The predators, meanwhile, crash/land (it’s difficult to decipher if the landing here is intentional) on Earth via the spaceships, cloaking technology and arrow guns we’ve known from each previous film in the franchise. Thus, the conceit is simple and similar to the first two Predator films: what happens when two evenly matched hunters are pitted against each other with one having such superior technological weaponry and physical might*.

‘Hunting’, as it is, fills not only most of the films action, but much of the subtextual content as well. Naru is a young Comanche who aspires to eventually learn to hunt like her masterful warrior brother, Dakota. But given the traditions of the tribe, her gender restricts her, her physical might and bravery questioned by anyone she tells her dreams to. Still, she’s the one who saw the Predator’s earth landing, and in thinking it was a spiritual epiphany from the gods refuses to budge. The film then is her trying to prove her might as a hunter and warrior, while the Predator continually bests the males who enter the film. The other metaphor, the invasion of the Native American environment by a Predator, is easily transferred to what is about to happen from the invading European settlers. It’s a clear idea, and explored just enough to give a quick action flick a tad more to consider intellectually than most of its type. To me, that’s more than enough to sustain the film’s subtext as the action sequences thrill that I personally feel the forced 2020 idea of young women empowerment seems only here to please social media engagement. She’s an aspiring, thrifty aspiring warrior, from the drop that’s enough, but instead we toil in internal Indian squabbles at this idea, wasting time from our eyeballs seeing the Predator, do, well, Predator things.

While I opened with the idea that this was an offbeat premise for the franchise to take, a clue at the films close ties it interestingly to Predator 2, a film that was already a neat enough tie in entry from its opening shot of long jungle shot pan out reveal of 1990 smog drenched Los Angeles. It’s my favorite film (the second one I mean) of the entry series and, if I’m totally honest, Prey’s reimagining, warts and all, isn’t that far off. Where else can you see a Predator drop the invisibility cloak and fight a grizzly bear to the death in hand to claw (or is it just claw to claw) combat? That’s cinema!

*a funny meme developed online that essentially argued that because the Predators always come to earth to essentially just maim and kill with relative ease, never seeking to make the fight in any way fair, that perhaps on their home planet they’re the dentists and loser affluent hunters that go to, say, Africa and sport hunt endangered animals for sport using protective convoys so the giraffes, rhinos, and lions have nothing resembling a sporting chance. I find this a pretty funny idea. 

 

Dracula (T. Fisher… 1958) Hammer/Dracula

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (T. Fisher… 1966) Hammer/Dracula

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (F. Francis… 1968) Hammer/Dracula

Taste the Blood of Dracula (P. Sasdy… 1970) Hammer/Dracula

A fun, random decision I began this year was watching Hammer franchises in actual order, rather than scattershot watches over the years in completely random order based on their immediate availability to me at any one time. Thus I was able to see these films as they had intended, (stupidly) amazed that there was some continuation and purpose to their plots and character arcs. Lee’s Dracula run was first and foremost, as Lee’s portrayal has long wowed me to no end, his bloodshot crimson eyes and barely human characterization singularly titanic in the lore of film vampires (which, in case you didn’t know, is my favorite sub-genre of Horror). The main four really excelled, but I’d like to point out perhaps my favorite of the bunch, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, which is so bawdry that even if it reduces Dracula to little screen time, his eventual resurrection set-piece (where a recently murdered man is cut open and hung like a pig to be bled out, his blood dripping on the ashes inside Dracula’s opened tomb rebirthing him from dust) and fiercest near-kill (towards Suzan Farmer’s Diana, the lead female role of the film) still largely shocked me. The hunting of Diana is what made Lee so gripping and darkly enticing in the role, and the Hammer Dracula films so original. Lee’s Dracula exudes a predatory sexual nature put on full display, and while not unlike what was implied in the Dracula lore since Stoker’s novel, Hammer exhibited Lee’s sexual urges for pure Horror. It wasn’t meant to be devilishly handsome or a mere necessary ill for the vampires ultimate survival, but it seemed like something he legitimately liked as part of the foreplay. Immortality was a side concern to his actual sadomasochistic kink, so rather than attacking Diana and biting her neck to begin her transfer to vampirism, Lee tears his shirt open and cuts himself, pulling a long bloody gash across his glistening chest and grabbing her face to pull in near to drink from him. It was all being done in 1966, the world was still only getting barely awake for such heinous acts. Which such lurid reds and fanfare, the follow ups came quick and are often great too; Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula. Slowly like any franchise the films began petering out, after Taste the Blood of Dracula Hammer feared Lee wouldn’t keep returning to the role, so when prepping the next installment (which followed later in the year [Scars of Dracula, 1970]) it broke the continuity of the story and configured it to almost exist as a quasi-reboot. In the end it was foolish, Lee still returned and now just appeared in films that were incredibly less striking and thematically inconsistent. It was also the barest one of the bunch, hence my stopping my revisit and only watching the real meat of the marrow, the choice Lee ones. Still, for my money, the greatest Dracula the celluloid has ever seen.

Pretty Poison (N. Black… 1968) black comedy/horror satire

Pretty Poison was something of a bellwether in it’s day, arriving to a smidge of fanfare as a perfect cutting edge, counter-culture vehicle for the kiddies to gobble up. It had two big, young leads—a prime Anthony Perkins fresh off a spate of hip European films (one being the great Welles adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial) and beautiful Tuesday Weld (who herself was trying a bit of a comeback with the success of The Cincinnati Kid) and a smart director willing to push the script into daring New Wave leaning waters. It all sounds like a classic, place it alongside The Graduate! But strangely, who knows of it now but maniacally demented cinephiles? What happened?

You plop down to watch it and it plays masterfully (at least initially). The story of Dennis Pitt (Perkins), a young man on parole from a mental institution who is attempting to reassimilate back to normal life with the help of a new factory job at a chemical bottling plant and the help of his sympathetic therapist/parole officer. A desire for ‘normal’ life is greatly sped up when he comes across Sue Ann (Weld), a beautiful blond high-schooler at the cusp of graduation. He has no way of courting a relationship, or even getting Sue Ann to spot him, so his mind begins playing tricks. In this case a game he plays to make sense of all the strangeness swirling about him in modern life. Suddenly he’s a CIA operate under deep cover, and he must attract Sue Ann to help him accomplish his current mission: sabotage the factory he works at and cease its pollutants from getting dumped into the town’s water stream. Sue Ann is immediately interested, the strangeness of it all is exciting and usually there isn’t much to do in such a small town where nothing generally happens. But what’s the actual end game? Doesn’t Dennis just want to attract the flirtatious Sue Ann? When the rubber hits the road and the plan must be exacted, the youngsters begin immediately making a series of ever cascading fatal blunders. First, there’s an accidental killing at the plant and then Sue Ann’s mother is getting a bit too uppity about her sudden precociousness, and Dennis is skirting his weekly parole officer check-ins. One after another their once optimistic futures begin quickly closing.

In the end the film is probably only tangentially Horror, it’s more the first act of Malick’s Badlands (imagine the climax of Badland‘s being father Warren Oates’ death sequence) stretched to feature length with the oddball nature of late 60’s counter-culture vibes throw in to provide the film’s thematic and aesthetic heft. It’s a shame the film sort of peters out (the first third or so when Perkins’ is bouncing around in mock CIA operative is legitimately brilliant), the strain of love on Dennis’ shoulders that he himself can’t manage, the film can’t either. Perhaps the culture, still in 1968 turmoil, didn’t know who to blame, or how to catapult a film’s resolution to form its subtextual narrative. So, it has to resolve like films before it did—someone is the villain and someone is the outsmarted victim, rather than merely continuing in sardonic glee, our young protagonists giving the overbearing world a bit of its own medicine. That is, you’ll recall, how Malick solved the issue in the end, but then his film was five years later, if only these kids saw all the way to 1973. But I suppose that’s some of the point too; Sue Ann will probably be on her fourth or fifth mark by the time the calendar strikes 1973, and that’s a scary enough proposition itself… To attract youthful audiences in 1968, it might not be smart to show our kids committing needless murder, what with their psyches shredded by Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s recent assassinations. But in 5 years and Watergate, everyone had soured.

Don’t Go in the House (J. Ellison… 1979) psychological thriller/slasher

I’m not sure there isn’t a pretty thorough piece to be written on what the slasher industry did to American Horror in combination with the ‘shining beacon on the hill’ zeitgeist of American life in awe of ex-B actor turned President, Ronald Reagan. I’m just musing, but if the humongous success of Halloween started it, the zeitgeist did the next move: turn genre cinema into more palatable features of a conservative, Christian bent. There could be violence, boatloads of nudity too, but there was a line, a separation of what VHS films could offer in droves from the deeper, darker sadism of the grindhouse films of the 1970s. It’s probably a point only for extreme aficionados, as to many Horror is just Horror, the mainstream works are squeamish enough for most, and the grimy, raw stuff I’m talking about is generally never even seen (and an important caveat to make as Halloween isn’t a conservative subtextual film, I mean it more in the copies). But it was just something I thought about during Don’t Go in the House as depending on where you look the movie up its release is either 1979 or 1980 (right at the turn in culture) and it’s technically a slasher (the sub-genre that would populate a lot of Horror, especially in American for younger audiences, for the next decade). It’s a slasher like so many of the early ones were: films about grown men with mother issues, but I bring this all up because it’s a bridge. It moves and looks so much like a 1970’s grindhouse flick, it’s trashy and grimy and at times looks both decently made to down right ineptly so. Oh, and finally, it’s a very, very nihilistic film—our killer burns people, mostly women, alive—where a world of degradation and exploitation runs rampant, where films purported a nihilistic world with only very cheap, passive joys for those willing to do unethical or unlawful things for them (and, we open with another wink to coming Reagan America, our lead loses his job burning trash at the local town garbage incinerator, the fate of so many during the economic downturn at the onset of the 1980s). Don’t Go in the House doesn’t budge from this idea, and in the end is just a grimy, ugly film, a great work for some Horror fans (not me) or, at the very least, an interesting piece in beginning the studying of the cultural zeitgeist at a real turning point (definitely me). So, perhaps necessary for Horror hounds, its visual anger easy enough to find.

Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out, aka Terror In Toyland) (L. Jackson… 1980) psychological thriller/slasher

The last several years of my cinematic exploits I’ve found that much of my watching has become quite regimented—late August into September begins the Horror season in earnest, a time that the clock striking October 1st begins officially. Then, given the glut of Horror I usually need a slight break of a week or three once November begins, so I’ve started watching ‘easy’ fun films—action, erotic thrillers, ’80’s and ’90’s big budget tentpole movies—into which Thanksgiving begins Holiday movies, often Christmas ones (real Christmas ones, no, not Die Hard) and, finally as the year ends, into the following January, an attempt to catch up on the year’s best new releases from the litany of critics’ Year-End lists. But what that says is that nearly half my year is sort of ceremonially spelled out, almost in a rut. Thus, this year I sought to break it, blurring a Horror film into my Christmas season watches (I’ve also vowed to maybe do a different genre this November than I’m to as well).

I’d last done this sort of genre blurring years ago with a revisit of Bob Clark’s masterpiece Black Christmas, a film that the choice this time could hardly measure up to. I’d also seen Christmas Evil before as well, but it was in early High School and, outside the Dad dressed as Santa and groping away at his wife, it’s a film I’d largely forgotten (and thus never listed on my Horror Master List). Christmas Evil is the tale of lonely Harry, the son to that leering, handsy Pops, who after seeing that becomes both repulsed and fascinated with Christmas’ mascot, Santa. After fast forwarding more than three decades we pick back up with him as he works in a toy factory as an enthusiastic middle manager (which, if you’re wondering, is a more vile persona than a murderous Santa if you ask me). He spends his days keeping an actual ‘naughty or nice’ list of the neighborhood’s kids and once his future is again threatened, turns to exacting revenge on those that have wronged him. Dressing as Santa he delivers the ‘goods’ house to house, eventually coming face to face with his past. There is supposed to be something resembling gravitas to Harry and his brothers confrontation—he’s the only real human connection for Harry, but in the ends it’s all a little exacting, a little too armchair therapist. The film was surely a trendsetter in its day, a time when this sort of exploitation against Santa was sacrilegious, but now it all seems a little naff. Both too much Taxi Driver and not nearly enough Taxi Driver.

*I didn’t mind it, thinking it more or less as good as the original David Gordon Green Halloween from 2018. Meaning much better than the dreadful Kills—it sort of has to be though given that film—but still be no means a consistently good, or deeply interesting movie. Given I did write pieces about both his Halloween‘s last year, I may do a piece just to wrap up my thoughts therein, but we’ll see.

Demon Wind (C. P. Moore… 1990) exploitation trash/zombie/supernatural

If The Black Phone (2021) was greatly assisted by watching it with old (Horror hound) friends, then Demon Wind would be the slam-the-door-shut exclamation point on that idea. Because while The Black Phone‘s seriousness made it all supremely silly, a film worthy of mock jeers aloud in the theater, then Demon Wind‘s earnestness deserves attention and praise from friends who get their jollies from such trash. Meaning, The Black Phone was only passable as the honey that attracted the bees to it, while Demon Wind is the honey from the bees, a film that not only attracts friends together but would reward them with a special, delirious night of real hooting and hollering as the actual centerpiece.

It’s a basic 1990 plot and set of white, American characters. A bunch of (probably college aged) aspiring yuppies, who dress hilariously and spout cheese whiz lines with Shakespeare-like dedication, abound in the remote countryside from a wild ask from lead friend, Cory. You see, the film opens in 1931 when a body is burned on a farm amidst bizarre religious underpinnings, and while the farm is able to initially ward off demonic forces via witchcraft it eventually falls when the demons grow stronger and stronger. Getting deeper, Cory explains he is the grandson to those that are all murdered by those demons and when his father, who could never quite deal with what happened that night, commits suicide he asks his group of rowdy buffoonish friends to find out what exactly happened all those decades prior and finally put all his family skeletons to rest. Given the title sequence starts with a truly bizarre, if striking melancholic beauty it doesn’t deserve—an eery reading of the traditional spiritual song ‘Washed in the Blood of the Lamb’*—you know you’re in for a real special (trick or) treat.

Sure, it’s little more than an Evil Dead/Evil Dead II rip off, but in an era where all the hip Horror people are currently hailing Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell (1995) as the one to watch (I covered that a few years back and found it pretty inept), I’d take Demon Wind ten out of ten times over it, as here is truly a special bad movie, one that belongs in the rungs with The Invisible Maniac’s, Demonwarp’s, Doom Asylum’s, Slugs’ and Basketcase’s of the world, films where mania is presented not as shlock but as completely earnest cinema. Films that grope for artistry, but flay in the winds of ineptitude, but the lack of any sense of irony planting them amongst a truly rare breed of ‘great’ cinema. The pinnacles of true and utter trash. Hearty beer and pizza recommend, the more that merrier around for this one.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TuU