Hey. I like horror movies.
Do you like horror movies? Good!
Stake Land
(Jim Mickle, 2010)
Stake Land is the kind of film where the term "wandering narrative" is a compliment, where nothing huge happening is sweet relief. Instead of high-octane bluster and bombast, the vampocalyptic story trudges along like one of its own post-traumatic survivors. There's a destination here, a refuge called "New Eden" that's always just over the next hill, but Stake Land functions foremost as a vision of society in ruin, similar to contemporaries like Children of Men, The Road, and Monsters. Director Jim Mickle builds the world with subtlety. Briefly-seen newspapers hint at the past. Christian cults suggest the emergence of a Medieval mindset. Meanwhile, actors like Kelly McGillis and Connor Paolo bury their despair under polite smiles. This film carries the confidence and emotion I hoped for and rarely got with The Walking Dead.
RATING: B+
Phantasm II
(Don Coscarelli, 1988)
The first Phantasm flick had a surreal edge that set it apart from its slasher-movie brethren. In theory, the beats were the same: young kids harassed by a slow-moving stalker with a unique weapon. In Phantasm, though, the kid was a child, the stalker was a dimension-crossing corpse, and his weapon was a levitating silver sphere that latches onto your head and drills into your forehead. I hate it when that happens. The sequel keeps most of these elements intact, with the first film's hero (James Le Gros) and sidekick Reggie (Reggie Bannister) searching the country for the trans-dimensional Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). What's lost is the odd discontinuity between scenes and intimidating atmosphere. What's gained is a straightforward revenge story and an emphasis on Evil Dead 2 camera athletics and ass-kickery. The film isn't as proudly idiosyncratic as the original, but Phantasm 2 still works as a nasty diversion.
RATING: B-
The Funhouse
(Tobe Hooper, 1981)
Although I'm an enormous fan of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's films strike me as shrill, one-note affairs that are half as clever as they want to be. That said, The Funhouse is the closest I've come to liking one of his films in a long time. Most of that appreciation comes from the opening, an almost brilliant subversion of expectations with its Halloween-esque stalking leading to a Psycho homage that ends with in-film nods to the original Frankenstein pictures. In addition to working as a canny "history of horror" sequence, this primes the audience for the threat waiting in the carnival. Once that threat is unmasked, the movie loses much of its ambition, turning into stalk-and-slash routine, and the family that operates the funhouse feels like a faded copy of the old Texas Chain Saw gang (complete with a non-verbal sexually confused monster-son with a love for dress-up) chasing after the usual teen archetypes.
RATING: C+
Sssssss
(Bernard L. Kowalski, 1973)
Ssssssshit.
RATING: F
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