Michael Walters
Notes from the peninsula
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This is my little word garden on the internet—Michael Walters, author (it’s true!). I have a speculative fiction novel, THE COMPLEX, out with Salt Publishing, and I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I would love it if you gave it a try.
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Director: Rolfe Kanefsky
A group of teenagers drive to a parents‘ vacant summer house in woods near a lake. One of them, the uptight film nerd Mike, calls out every possible warning sign that they’re in danger, annoying his friends (and the viewer). He’s obnoxious. And of course he ends up being right.
This popped up on Mubi billed as a low-budget meta horror film made four years before Scream. It’s a mix of Cabin in the Woods, Friday the 13th, Evil Dead and Scream, but with no budget. To make up for it, the location is cool, the director makes some clever shot choices, and quickfire editing when the action ramps up hides a lot. At one point we see the mike boom hanging down, and for a moment your heart sinks, but then one of the actors swings on it to escape the attacking creature. You have to admire the chutzpah.
Another van of teenagers shows up at the halfway point displaying all the hallmarks of slasher victims, but they’re at the wrong lake, so they cheerfully drive on. It’s fun, a broad horror comedy that isn’t afraid of the horror, with everyone seemingly enjoying themselves. And none of the actors went on to make anything of note. I hope they get a little recognition now.
Castle Freak (1995)
Director: Stuart Gordon
The Reilly family arrive in Italy to inherit a castle left to them by an elderly Duchess. They don’t know that she kept a creature chained up in the dungeons, beaten and fed on scraps until her death. John, Susan and their daughter Rebecca plan to only stay as long as it takes to make an inventory of the place, but the desperate creature escapes causing cannibalistic mayhem.
John and Susan are barely holding on in their marriage — he killed their son in a drunken car crash that also blinded their daughter. Even though it must be intentional, the heightened acting style and melodramatic tone is annoying. The creature is like Frankenstein’s monster, but created through abuse rather than science, and the most effective parts of the film are when he is shambling through the castle after his prey.
The copy on Shudder is terrible quality, so this felt like watching a VHS tape back in the day, and for one particularly tough cannibalism scene I was actually glad of the fuzzy picture. Let’s call it a fundamental mix-up between intimacy and appetite.
Re-Animator (1985)
Director: Stuart Gordon
When I was a teenager, this film had the reputation of being so fucked up that it’s taken me thirty years to press play. I started #31DaysofHorror in 2018, and each year I’ve looked at the cover art and thought, nah, maybe next time. It’s smaller, more amusing, and cheaper looking than I expected, a celebration of creativity under constraints. There are only a handful of interior locations and a series of increasingly impressive gore effects.
It’s a version of Frankenstein, a subject clearly dear to Stuart Gordon’s heart since there are similar mad scientists and abused creatures in other films he’s made. Barbara Crampton as Megan commits wholeheartedly to Gordon’s camp vision and makes some courageous decisions (if you‘ve seen the ending you know what I mean). Jeffrey Combs is comically psychopathic as Herbert West, the lodger-scientist with an ever-present syringe full of neon green liquid.
All the men are awful, especially the lecherous Dr Hill with his crush on Megan, and Megan’s controlling father, who’s also the Dean of the medical school. As bad as Herbert is, at least he’s straightforward. Even the initially sympathetic Dan, Megan’s boyfriend, isn’t immune to ambition. Put down the syringe and step away, boys.
65 (2023)
Director: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Monster movies are horror, but are dinosaurs monsters? Of course. Jurassic Park is horror, just for kids as well as adults. Now that we’ve cleared that up, 65 is about an alien (to all intents and purposes a human) who gets stranded on Earth when an asteroid hits his ship sixty-five million years ago. There is a fellow survivor. There are a series of desperate challenges. There are dinosaurs.
65 is a terrible title. The card at the beginning tells us the story happened 65 million years ago. Perhaps there are no good titles left. It’s also a weird premise, but Adam Driver knows how to be an emotionally repressed soldier, and Ariana Greenblatt is marvellous as the other survivor. The story is frustratingly emotionally manipulative. To its credit, the eighty-eight minutes fly by. I love sub ninety-minute films.
There isn’t much more to say about it. As I write this, Dad’s moved on to watch the latest episode of Wheels of Time. These are the sorts of stories that pulled him through life. Fantasy, action, science-fiction. Most genre films are mediocre, but they serve a psychological function. I wonder how much of his story addiction is now in me? What was his influence on me as a child? Am I numbing myself with this shit?
The Pale Blue Eye (2022)
Director: Scott Cooper
A nineteenth century murder mystery set in the snowbound US military academy at West Point, where a cadet is found hanged with his heart removed from his body. The military leadership want an investigation to catch the killer and quickly clear the camp’s reputation, so they call upon a renowned retired detective, Augustus Landor, who joins forces with an unexpected ally, Cadet Edgar Allan Poe (yes, that one).
The cast is stacked with talent: Christian Bale, Gillian Anderson, Timothy Spall, Charlote Gainsbourg, and even Robert Duvall, who I didn’t recognise, and Harry Melling as Poe, who’s clearly brilliant but whose dialogue and affectations grate after a while. The gruesome killings, autopsy scenes and eventual satanic rituals give it a satisfying October vibe. I loved the locations and costumes. It brought to life the way people might have lived in the early nineteenth century, and while I probably wouldn’t have survived childhood, I could imagine myself in the fire-lit tavern, using blades for fighting, walking snowy forest paths with a hand-held lanterns and keeping an eye out for a monster in the wilds.
The story unfolds too slowly — there is a lot of procedural detail — and for me the finale’s twist didn’t work, but in most ways it fit the bill.
The Exorcist III (1990)
Director: William Peter Blatty
It took me a long time to track a copy of this down. Fifteen years after Father Damien Karras’s exorcism of Regan McNeil, a serial killer sets out on a series of brutal murders that is reminiscent of the long-dead Gemini Killer. Each death is a meticulous obscenity that is wisely more spoken of than shown. Lieutenant Bill Kinderman (the ever wonderful George C. Scott) is a seasoned but good humoured detective trying to connect the dots.
Kinderman has a tender relationship with Father Dyer, played by Ed Flanders, because they both knew the dead Father Karras. I’d heard Mark Kermode talk about George C Scott’s improvised story about carp that makes Ed Flanders giggle, so it was a joy to see it in context. The two men bond over cinema and banter like an old married couple. This gives the midpoint plot development an extra emotional kick.
The whole film is more of an existential downer than I expected. It’s about a demon bringing hell to earth after all. It’s flawed but also filled with wonders, and it must have been an influence on David Fincher’s Seven. Brad Dourif has to say some awful dialogue but gives such a great performance you almost buy it (souls drifting after death so that demons can slip them into other people’s bodies?). The final act is a bit of a mess, but portrayals of hell are tricky, especially with 1990 special effects. The now-famous hospital jump scare is truly one for the ages.
Director: George Romero
I’ll say up front that this was not for me. On a remote island, a long-running feud between the O’Flynns and Muldoons becomes violent over whether the walking dead should be culled or chained up in case a cure is found. Patriarch Patrick O’Flynn is exiled to the mainland where he holes up in a harbour and uses the internet to lure people to rob them. Four mercenary soldiers are tempted by O’Flynn’s message (an island where the zombie outbreak is under control!), and seeing an opportunity to usurp the Muldoons, O’Flynn seizes it.
This is a dud, plain and simple. The tone is all wrong, a zombie western with off-kilter comedy (a zombie riding a horse around the island ffs) mixed with gunfights and attempts to get the zombies to eat horses instead of people (?!). Left to their own devices, these zombies do unthinkingly whatever they naturally did while alive. There’s a cool set piece at a harbour where the soldiers have to get across the water to a ferry with zombies reaching up from the bottom. However, there’s no escaping the bad dialogue and clichéd family drama.
Looking for the positives, Romero’s social theme to chew on is unthinking feuds, and the zombie-like fighting that goes on between tribes. It also touches on religion, misogyny and entitlement, but it’s too silly to make much of a mark.
Diary of the Dead (2007)
Director: George Romero
The final few George Romero zombie films went under my radar. Even though this had mixed reviews, I didn’t believe Romero could make a complete dud. This one starts with film students making a horror movie in the woods who hear on the radio reports of the dead coming back to life. Director and cameraman Jason decides he will film the zombie apocalypse in as much detail as he can, putting pressure on relationships within the group in his desire to meticulously record everything that happens.
The found footage style, with the conceit of it being edited later, works well, and the zombies are slow, bordering on comical, until they get hold of someone. In one fun twist, an alcoholic old thespian turns out to be a highly skilled archer, but the other characters are a pretty standard bunch.
There’s lots of commentary on what it means to film something, how screens are a barrier to reality, and the toxic pull of hits and likes when Jason’s film goes viral (as viral as something could go in 2007). Romero made this before the iPhone was released. Now we all record and share online without a thought. And I’d forgotten that Romero’s zombies are not infected — anyone who dies with their brain intact comes back. That’s dark. This isn’t a plague, it’s hell on earth.
Director: Mario Caiano
I’m always surfing the edges of horror in October. I have to pace myself and mix things up to stay engaged. Giallo films bring thriller and mystery elements alongside gruesome murders, but Eye of the Labyrinth saves its horror to the final few minutes. Until then, it’s a whodunnit, or a didanybodydoit, or a whydidsomonemaybedoit.
Julie is looking for her missing psychiatrist (hard relate) and travels to a remote Greek island to search for him. Once there she finds herself at a villa on a clifftop with a commune of artists all acting suspiciously. The location has Glass Onion vibes, and the people are similarly kooky, but these residents are painters, actors and composers, all working under the patronage of Gerta, the terse older woman who runs the place.
Julie doesn’t make much progress until she begins to have flashbacks to a painting — an eye at the centre of a labyrinth. The twists and turns kept me hooked, and I have a soft spot for these seventies euro mysteries, especially when the people and locations are attractive. The horror at the end is good fun and Julie gets to have her revengeful moment in the sun.
Director: Andrea Bianchi
A hard left turn down an alleyway into a softcore giallo. This might be a spoiler, but the killer did not require anyone to “strip nude”, although there is a tremendous amount of sleazy sex, admirably straightforward nudity, and comically leering men. Sometimes the algorithm wears you down, and the familiar cover art catches you in a vulnerable moment, and you choose a film that you know will be bad… except it’s good!
God, the men are awful in this film, but the characters all work for a seventies fashion agency, so this was probably not far from reality. A woman dies of a heart attack while having an illegal abortion and two men make it look like she died in her bath at home. That night a killer in black motorcycle leathers and helmet kills the doctor, then begins to systematically dispatch everyone at the agency where the dead woman worked.
Each character gets some time to shine, and much comeuppance is had alongside the sex. The male protagonist is a dreadful human being, and I kept asking the beautiful, smart woman working with him (the luminescent Edwige Fenech) why she found him so attractive, but it was probably the same reason I kept watching this film — it’s never dull, there’s always an interesting angle, and it’s endless eye candy.