How about a few movie reviews? That was, after all, the intent of starting my first website ten long years ago, and it’s the weekend prior to Halloween. You might be looking for something to watch some evening.
AMERICAN FABLE
I’ve had the chance to watch several horror movies lately and the best of the bunch by far was American Fable, which is a chiller, a period drama, and a fairy tale. Before the backdrop of the Midwest farm crisis, Gitty, a tween-age girl, roams her family’s verdant but imperiled Wisconsin farm. From the living room television, friend of the working man Ronald Reagan pontificates that it is not the role of the federal government to intervene as family farmers default en masse, allowing large businesses to buy their homes and farms at a discount. (Someone has apparently used this speech to place the movie’s events in 1982.) Gitty’s father, Abe, voices the anxiety and resentment of the other side, listing a series of foreclosures and suicides among their neighbors. Abe is not going to let it happen to their farm, their home.
During one of her rambles Gitty ignores her father’s admonishment to stay away from their disused silo and finds a spectacled, waistcoated man named Jonathan trapped inside. Though Gitty flees their first encounter, she returns later with books and a chess set, and strikes up a friendship with Jonathan, who bargains with Gitty for his release; he will do anything she asks if she helps him escape. A short time after their first meeting, a dark, horned rider is seen from a distance, riding a black horse across the farm.
Abe falls from a loft in their barn and is hospitalized, in a coma from which no one can say whether he will recover. He is eventually brought home, where he lies motionless while Gitty’s mother attends him. Gitty’s vile brother, Martin, attempts to pull himself into manhood in his father’s stead, but achieves only a cruel and psychopathic hypermasculinity.
It’s a marvel how this movie is so evocative as a 1980s period piece while at the same time being essentially a Brothers Grimm tale, charged with menace both human and supernatural, and haloed with trance-like cinematography reminiscent of a Terrence Mallick film. From Reagan’s televised speech to Abe’s boxy Chevy, the movie transports the viewer almost physically to the 1980s. You feel you could touch the screen, walk through it and back into those years; they look just as you remember them. And yet the fairy tale motifs are just as unmistakeable: the prisoner locked in a tower, the gnomish wish-granter, the Faustian bargain, the enchanted slumber, the hateful sibling, and the child heroine.
American Fable is also a horror film, for certain, even though it doesn’t become explicitly a frightening until its final act. It’s a perfect combination of slow-building tension, a what-the-fuck twist, and fear-charged final act.
THE DEVIL’S CANDY
Metal, horror, and madness have long been associated but few movies take advantage of the connections between them. The Devil’s Candy gathers these strands and combines them into a single oily black devillock that divides your twisted snarl from hairline to chin for the entire length of the film.
The movie opens with the ingeniously-named Ray Smilie standing before a crucifix, banging out the same earsplitting chord over and over again on his Gibson Flying V guitar. When his mother tells him to turn it down, he tells her he plays it loud so he can’t hear “him.” When she tells him he needs psychiatric help, he pushes her down the stairs.
That happy prologue out of the way, we see the Hellman family viewing, buying, and moving into the Smilies’ old house. Jesse, the husband and father, is a metal-loving painter with an “Iggy Pop at 40” sense of personal style. His daughter, Zooey is a metal-loving middle schooler. Astrid, the wife and mother, might or might not love metal, it wasn’t clear to me.
So Jesse sets up a studio in the barn and gets down to some Maude Lebowski-level creative fits, like full contact painting on a 6′ by 6′ canvas. His new paintings would be at home in the Denver International Airport. He also starts hearing voices and having inopportune mental lapses. Ray eventually turns up at his old home, gives Zooey his Flying V, and otherwise starts lurking around. He’s also creeping everybody out with always-darting-around eyes, which actor Vince Pruitt Taylor also displayed in the season three X-Files episode “Unruhe.” (Pruitt Taylor has a medical condition, nystagmus, that causes involuntary eye movement.)
The Devil’s Candy is legit scary. Ethan Embry is unrecognizable as Jesse. I mean, he looks nothing like Rusty Griswold #3 or the pencil-wristed Gwar fan he played in Empire Records. Dude looks shredded. Anyway, the movie is nearly great, there’s just one confusing and unneeded aside about an art gallery called Belial. In the context of a movie about metal, murder, and two men who might or might not be under the influence of the Prince of Darkness, that’s a clumsy-ass baseball bat of a name. It’s not as bad as calling the gallery “Satan,” but it’s about as subtle as “Asteroth” or “Beelzebub.” Combine it with the insouciance and “in on the joke” smirks of the gallery’s owner and receptionist, and you’re left wondering if they are agents of the Evil One. This question is not further explored after Jesse leaves the gallery, so it ends up being a sort of auxiliary nipple; mildly interesting, but ultimately without purpose or function.
BEYOND THE GATES
As a former owner of Nightmare: The Video Board Game, this movie was a nostalgia trip I could not pass up. Beyond the Gates is about two brothers who reunite to liquidate their father’s owner-operated video store several months after his disappearance. In his office, they find an old and foreboding VCR board game. The movie’s like a requiem for VHS, video stores, and VCR board games, all three.
The game is called Beyond the Gates, and they pop it into a VCR. The recorded moderator doesn’t much seem like a recording though … it seems like she’s watching and reacting to them in real time. Craziness ensues.
As far as horror goes, it has the same aesthetic as the 1987 kiddie horror flick The Gate. It has a harder edge and it’s not for kids, but the lighting and makeup are similar. For even more nostalgia value, though, Barbara Crampton was cast as the game’s moderator. I don’t know if you have to be a board gamer or Generation X to appreciate this movie, but it certainly helps.
TALES OF HALLOWEEN
Reddit let me down with this one; strangers I talk to online led me to believe it was going to be great.
I can understand the early hype: It’s an anthology film of loosely connected stories that take place in the same town on Halloween night. If you loved Trick ‘r Treat – and a lot of people did – this sounds like a winner. What I can’t understand is so many people remained enthusiastic about this movie after having seen it.
Because the thing is, Tales of Halloween has ten fucking vignettes. If you’re thinking, “More is better,” it’s still only 92 minutes long. So whereas Southbound had five vignettes across 89 minutes, for roughly 18 minutes per story, and V/H/S had six (counting the frame story) across 116 minutes, for roughly 19 minutes per story, the stories in Tales of Halloween are nine shitty minutes long.
Nine minutes is not much time to establish atmosphere or get viewers invested in characters. Maybe that doesn’t matter. There’s an audience for horror movies like these. I call them “people from Middletown, Ohio,” but depending on where you’ve lived, that label might be useless. They’re the same people who went to every fucking Saw movie and insisted they kept getting scarier. They like horror movies that are “badass,” as in, “D’yude, thet Saw IV is fucking is ba-yadass.” They’re the horror fan equivalents of the people laughing at the movie Ass is Idiocracy.
The makers would be impervious to the criticism that their movie is mostly cheap set-ups for gore. They even seem to have anticipated it. In the seventh vignette – and I can’t believe, in reference to a 90-minute movie, I’m even using the phrase “the seventh vignette” – a fussy, uptight man decorates his lawn in old school horror style while his new neighbors across the street come outside in their biker leathers, crank up some thrashy music, and start hacking limbs off mannequins. It’s painfully obvious that to the makers of the movie, this other guy with his Universal Pictures sensibility is basically Martha Stewart with a cock, and these dicks across the street are fucking awesome. I MEAN, THERE’S GORE, MOTHERFUCKER! LOOK AT THET SHIT, THET SHIT’S BA-YAD-A-YASS. Because horror is only about blood and viscera, and if there’s no gore, it’s bullshit for pussies. RIGHT? RIGHT?
Also worthy of particular scorn is a vignette in which someone tries to summon some creature to get vengeance on three apparent thrill killers who, as children, burned his parents to death in their camper on Halloween night.
I mean, I’m guessing, I don’t actually know much about these characters BECAUSE THEIR VIGNETTE IS LIKE NINE MINUTES LONG. So yeah, these little kids burn a camper with two people inside it, those people’s son seeks supernatural creature revenge. It happened in an alley, because there are no vagrancy laws anywhere that would prevent a family from parking their camper in an alley. Good thinking.
Two of the vignettes manage against all odds to be good. Well, both are amusing and one is good. In one, a boy in a devil suit gets shamed into chucking an egg at the creepy house in his neighborhood. The occupant, a top-hatted, demonic Barry Bostwick, catches him and promises to show him a Halloween stunt he’ll never forget. Soon Barry and his devil-costumed pal are engaging in increasingly brazen acts of mayhem, including standing on the counter of a convenience store, firing a snub-nosed revolver at the ceiling during a hold-up. The little guy is cute.
The other also features a diminutive hell-raiser, this one kidnapped by a of ransom-seekers who immediately regret their decision. It’s not nearly as strong as the other, but it’s fun.
That’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll be watching some more movies in the next few days.