HORROR MOVIE MARATHON
john cribbs
PART II: BAD PREGNANCIES, HOMICIDAL BABIES & SUBTERRANEAN LUNATICS
Where the internet intersects film, you will find horror movies the subject of discussion. The Pink Smoke is no different: John Cribbs has annually written about his marathon horror film viewing sessions. Normally, it's a month of horror film in October. This year, he's waited until springtime to settle in to watching dozens of blood-soaked, lunatic-centric filcks - whatever, it doesn't necessarily make sense present this in April, but he's a not robot or a bureaucrat, so get off his back, grandpa. This year's selections are divided up thematically; with Part I casting his two evil eyes on films concerning homidical children and works from the direst of decades for horror cinema, the 1990's. Part II takes a look at Bad Pregnancies, Homicidal Babies and Subterranean Lunatics!
BAD PREGNANCIES & KILLER BABIES
With my wife being pregnant and all I thought it'd be devious of me to include some baby-related horror movies into this year's rotation (and read her the Ray Bradbury classic "The Small Assassin.") Rosemary's Baby and It's Alive were too obvious, but I still wanted to find movies representing all three stages of pregnancy: being knocked up by the devil, luring strange men to your apartment to murder them and drink their blood, and raising a 21-year-old retarded man who wears diapers and sleeps in a regular-sized crib. These movies fit the bill nicely...
Beyond the Door (1974)
a.k.a. Beyond Obsession, The Devil Within Her, Who Are You?
I like to think that I'm really not a snob when it comes to Euro-exploitation imitations of big American horror films from the 70's and 80's. For example, I like Seytan, the Turkish Exorcist, better than the original: it's interesting to see what a cover version of a famous film takes from its inspiration and what it adds to the mix. Sometimes (not often) it's just legitimately better than the template. But of all the Exorcist clones - Naked Exorcism, Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil, Alberto De Martino's The Antichrist - this is one of the less inspired. It starts off promisingly enough, with no less than Satan providing opening narration as one of his bamboozled disciples drives a white Jaguar off a California cliff. Luckily the guy had already performed some sort of naked ritual which causes Miss Bliss from the original incarnation of "Saved by the Bell" (I guess more famously known as Hayley Mills' sister Juliet) to become pregnant with a hellspawn. She starts becoming less the doting housewife to her pretentious artist-husband, more abusive towards her weird, spoiled kids and finally locks herself in her bedroom to get in some quality mid-air hovering, head rotating, acne sprouting, profanity spouting and bile spewing. Now where have I seen all that before?
Although she gives a good performance, Mills' pregnant/possession scenes are insanely boring and pretty much kill the movie. To be fair she doesn't have Jason Miller and Max von Sydow (or William Friedkin) there to help make things interesting. There wasn't much going on up to that point either, and only two earlier scenes really stand out. In the first one, the two kids (one of whom owns multiple copies of Love Story by Erich Segal for a reason not really explained) are terrorized in their room by floating objects and a shifting floor; the effects and use of different camera lenses employed here would have been helpful in making the later bedroom scenes less boring. The other decent if useless scene has Mills' husband walking around confused about what's happening to his wife when he's accosted by street musicians who follow him around incessantly until he runs away from them. Again this is not quite explained, but I would think having a bunch of freaky street musicians following you around town would get to be a little ominous after a while. Right?
Baby Blood (1990)
a.k.a. The Evil Within.
Emmanuelle Escourrou plays Yanka. Yanka is a carnival moll. When an ancient, parasitic evil hiding inside a leopard transfers itself into her unborn fetus, she sets off on her own turbulent journey of what can best be described as a very difficult pregnancy. Specifically, her unborn child demands fresh blood and plenty of it. This film was the highlight of this year's marathon - it's just my flavor. Borrowing elements from Henenlotter and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession, with a production that reminded me aesthetically of Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man, it's just got the right mix of humor and bodily horror. My wife has been handling her pregnancy like a champ: she has the typical aches and anxieties, but she never complains or resorts to the kind of unreasonable behavior that pregnant women in movies and sitcoms are often portrayed as enacting. She also hasn't tried to kill anyone and drink their blood (that I know of) but I'll bet she feels like it all the time.
Though dubbed and kind of weird looking, the gap-toothed Escourrou really carries the movie with a powerhouse performance as she converses with her sentient fetus/parasite (in scenes reminiscent of the Brian/Aylmer relationship from Brain Damage) and goes from tormented victim to unencumbered mutilator. Great set design and location shooting help give the film a classy look considering it's a movie about a homicidal demon living inside a pregnant woman. I don't have much more to say about it: the movie really speaks for itself, and it's the one entry this year I'd recommend to anybody who likes this sort of thing so go check it out. Baby Blood came out in 1990 but wasn't released in the US until the genuises at Anchor Bay put it on dvd in 2006, so it's sort of a buried treasure that might have inspired horror directors from the 90's to heighten the bar if it had received proper distribution back in the day. A missed opportunity there. Interesting fact: director Alain Roback provided the voice of the creature in the original French language, credited under the name "Roger Placenta." After watching the movie, I found out a sequel, Lady Blood, was released last year. I think that's awesome: a sequel made 18 years later with the same actress? I can't wait to see it.
The Baby.
After watching this one again for the first time in years I actually decided to do a much longer review - COMING SOON!
BENEATH THE SURFACE
Let me tell you about this comic book villain named Vermin. A geneticist working for Baron Zemo, he was transformed during an experiment gone bad into a full-sized, feral rat-like creature with short fur all over his body and blazing red eyes. Haunting the pages of Captain America and Spectacular Spiderman, he would drag people into the sewers and eat them. When I was a kid, he scared the bejeezus out of me (for more on Vermin, consult your local library!) So movies featuring any form of cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller are likely to give me the willies, as such creatures can only compound the already unpleasant experience of crawling around in a dank, unsanitary dark tunnel. Recent releases like Catacombs and Midnight Meat Train have continued the tradition of the horror film where normal folks are spirited away in the tunnels beneath large cities, but the ones I watched this year are probably the Citizen Kanes of the renegade underground cannibal killer genre...
Raw Meat.
a.k.a. Death Line.
Mind the doors!* I’ve
been trying to sneak this one into the marathon for the last three years, but
for some reason it never made the final lineup until now. At the same time that
Walter Matthau was trying to thwart Robert Shaw's takeover of a subway train in
New York, Donald Pleasance was across the pond trying to stop a deranged tube
dweller from terrorizing the London underground. I mention this because the
tunnel troll in this flick looks a lot like the undercover cop from The
Taking of Pelham 123, the one with the tweed sports coat and long hair who
Matthau mistakenly calls "miss." This guy's face is a little more grotesque:
skin's a little more flaky, syphilitic lesions a little redder and more full of
puss, and he survives by kidnapping train commuters and making a meal out of
them for himself and his equally appealing underground dweller-wife. I figured
all that out after replaying parts of the movie and reading some reviews: at
first I thought he snatched a young woman to impregnate her and continue his
line of Death Line cannibals, but I guess he just wants her as food? It
was a little unclear, and really kind of bothered me as I was viewing the film.
The movie does make good use of the ominous London Underground (used to
similarly eerie effect in everything from An American Werewolf in London
and 28 Days Later to the dark Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of
the Bruce-Partington Plans"...I'm sure the Daleks messed around down there too
at some point or another) but populates it with a lot of dull, cardboard
charcters it's impossible to care about with one notable exception...Donald
Pleasance as an angry alcoholic cop.
Pleasance essentially plays a British Hoke Moseley whose personal problems and general frustration with police procedure dominate the subplot until he finally catches up with the killer at the end. As usual his strange performance enlivens an otherwise so-so horror flick and watching him got me through the film, but he's really the only highlight. British horror in general at that point (dominated by the overrated films from Hammer Studios) seemed to have trouble getting out of the kind of hokey monster-amas from the 50's and 60's, and this one is no different. I did appreciate the political view of the film, that people could disappear in the tube for years and only when it's some important politician do the authorities actually give a shit. But that's really stretching: I liked the movie, it was fine, but based on what I've heard it's more than a little overrated and, in my mind, surpassed by a better retread of the same territory (move down three reviews.) The look of the film reminded me of The Night Stalker, with Pleasance playing the Kolchak role and the cannibal replacing Janos the vampire (and London standing in for Vegas.)
C.H.U.D.
This year I finally got around to watching C.H.U.D. No particular reason except that it fit in with the "underground dweller" theme, and that I already had such a cultural awareness of the movie that there was no reason not to just finally see the damn thing. For those who aren't aware of C.H.U.D, it's not a film about the Finno-Ugric peoples who used to occupy the area that makes up present-day Finland, Estonia and Northwest Russia (who were known as the chud or the chudes.) It's about carnivoristic humanoid aboveground photographer John Heard (a C.H.A.P.), who starts to notice his homeless models are disappearing at an alarming rate. As in Raw Meat, nobody actually cares about the disappearances until a respectable citizen becomes one of the victims. Although it has the horror element of the mutated cannibals, C.H.U.D. is really more of a political thriller complete with deep-reaching government cover-up (the acronym itself turns out to be a plot twist.) Although it includes plenty of scenes of cannibalism committed by the aforementioned underground dwellers, like an effective apartment invasion where Kim Greist fights for her life against the gross, offensive, oozing, glowy-eyed terrors (or G.O.O.G.E.T.s), the movie seems much more interested in the conspiracy that created them in the first place.
Kind of odd, right? Like if Jaws was mainly about the town heads trying to keep the shark rumors quiet and the beaches open while the shark was a mere annoyance. Imagine if that movie ended with Chief Brody giving a rousing speech to the community at a town gathering, news reaches him that the shark has been killed by Quint & Hooper, then the mayor pulls a gun, takes a kid hostage and is eventually gunned down by Brody. That basically sums up the last 20 minutes of C.H.U.D. - after Greist gets out of her apartment safely, the rest of the film focuses on Heard and Daniel Stern teaming up to defeat the scheming government lackey who's been trying to cover up the secret in a thrilling shoot-out that ends with some sort of equivolent of the high-five freeze frame. But wait, what about the creatures? Are they still prowling the sewers like Vermin? Do I actually have to see Bud the C.H.U.D. to find out? (cuz it's out of print.) Truly a weird turn, especially since the monsters look pretty mean and there plenty of them to rise to the surface and terrorize the city until they're defeated by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a positive example of what can come out of the ooze.)
* Last time I was in London that had been changed to "mind the gap." Just fyi to potential Raw Meat remake writers.
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