MINI-REVIEWS: Vamps, The Space Children, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

The dreaded specter of Real Life has once again slinked into my existence and challenged my desire to say more than could ever be necessary to say about the horror genre.  Consider this a way to ignore the shadow hanging over my shoulder.

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Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

(Frank H. Woodward, 2008)

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown is a fair and precise dissection of the most influential horror writer of the twentieth century.  Assembled by Frank H. Woodward, Lovecraft avoids the chintzy animations and easy love that plague lesser documentaries.  Instead, he keeps the style steady, and his commentators dig into Lovecraft's childhood, racism, love life, and, inevitably, his pantheon of unforgettable stories.  A clutch of genre "stars,” including Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter, and Neil Gaiman, offer perspective, and one of the joys here is spending significant time with each commentator.  Gaiman admires Lovecraft's imagery, but he's more bemused by the writing style than entranced.  Del Toro latches onto a kinship with Lovecraft's outsider status.  Scholar S.T. Joshi (who annotated the essential Penguin editions of Lovecraft's stories) seems defensive, smiling wryly while downplaying Lovecraft's racist tendencies.  With their extended takes and Lovecraft-influenced art, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown doubles as honorable biography and the horror equivalent of student-teacher evaluations.

RATING: B+

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The Space Children

(Jack Arnold, 1958)

A variation on body-snatching movies of the fifties, The Space Children tells the story of kids at an army base who wander by the beach and find a luminescent alien brain inside a cave.  The brain pulsates and jiggles like a Cosby-approved Jello snack and gives the kids telepathic orders that connect to the base's upcoming nuclear launch.  Meanwhile, the brain grows as big as a much larger brain.  The Space Children is unlikely to intrigue casual movie-watchers, as its naive conclusions lack the more modern cynicism of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Meanwhile, genre fans know this idea was done to better effect in director Jack Arnold's other alien brain-washing film, It Came From Outer Space.  The film is hardly a failure, with some convincing child actors and an underlying curiosity to the material, and viewers already interested in this sub-sub-genre will find rewards.  As it rolls along, however, The Space Children never graduates from diverting exercise into imperative viewing.

RATING: C

For some clips from MST3K's "riff" on The Space Children, click here.  "His sitting was out of control by the end."

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Vamps

(Amy Heckerling, 2012)

The modern glut of young-adult vampirism gets a soft elbow to the ribs in Amy Heckerling's supernatural comedy Vamps.  The story centers on Goody (Alicia Silverstone), a two-hundred-year-old vampire who feels increasingly displaced in the world of iPhones and Facebook.  Goody's inability to keep up with kids her "age" plays like a canny commentary on Silverstone's trouble adapting to life post-Clueless, and Heckerling similarly longs for the old days, bombarding the viewer with clips from Nosferatu and late-film effects inspired by Ray Harryhausen.  Some of the jokes pander, with fake tans and a shower of one-liners about texting, and there are times when the film betrays its wisdom-over-youth theme; a cancer subplot deteriorates from a harsh look at death into childish vampire-aided wish fulfillment.  Although the film itself never quite holds together, it’s hard to dislike Vamps outright, so effervescent are its lead actresses.  Krysten Ritter is so charming and lovely that I won’t be able to say no when she asks me out someday.

RATING: B-