The Oracle (1985), by Roberta Finlay

Roberta and Michael Findlay were trash legends, it's fair to say. They made The Touch of Her Flesh and its two sequels, a film series in which someone is vaginally assaulted with a lobster claw. (Not in all of the movies, just one. I think.) It's hard to imagine a married couple being inspired by the goddamn Olga films, and then going on to make classics like Snuff and Shriek of the Mutilated. Michael met a grisly end, being chopped to pieces by a helicopter in 1977, but Roberta kept on making horror into the late '80s. The Oracle is the first of these later outings that I've seen, but what I saw not only impressed me cinematically, but it worked as great trash too. This movie's pretty intense.

We open with some good ol' automatic writing being down by downtown medium Mrs. Malatesta. (Huh, wonder if her husband runs a Carnival of Blood--no, not that Carnival of Blood, I mean this one.) She has a ghost-planchette which is about to summon the spirits responsible for her demise; the planchette's new owner comes along shortly. Her name is Jennifer, and she's a friendly, ordinary woman who is married to world's biggest jerk. Men, if you constantly call your wife hysterical and embarrassing except for when you want sex, you're a stupid motherfucker and you should put your testicles under a jackhammer. Anyway, once the landlord, Mr. Pappas--who has a Greek name but acts like a Mexican stereotype--hands off the planchette, then Jennifer starts running into trouble. And not just because her dumb houseguests make the hand spell out "I am horny." Jennifer makes contact with the ghost of a murdered businessman named William Graham, who helps her uncover a conspiracy of murderers involving an evil factory manager and a trans male assassin named Farkas. And of course, no one believes her, or believes that she's sane.

This movie actually works really well as a commentary on how women are treated and gaslit in our society. At almost no point in time do any of Jennifer's friends or loved ones consider that she could be, y'know, telling the truth. They don't even consider that her paranormal experiences could be based on completely ordinary phenomena! Maybe it's bad writing--trust me, the dialogue is pretty goddamn bad, even if it's frequently hilarious--but the world is set against this poor lady as it is for many women in real life. It's a pretty crude form of dealing with a real issue, but crudeness is perhaps what's needed. Sometimes a sword will do, but other times a club just hits a little better. Apply a little reason, chaps! If your ladyfriend goes crazy on you there's probably a cause, and not just a tilting of the womb or whatever.

The theme is so blatant that I'm not really gonna spend that much time on it. IT'S TIME FOR TRASH INSTEAD.

Alright, so this movie really acts like it's two movies sewn together, Godfrey Ho-style. There's the occult stuff and there's the murders with Farkas. They come together at the end but it's funny how far apart they are. And how awkwardly they're cut together. In between scenes of Jennifer's Christmas Eve party are snippets from Farkas' murders. He hires a prostitute who he kills after she finds out about his genitals. He goes to a diner with the world's bitchiest waitress and takes an angry phone call from the diner's phone. ("Oh my God! He even ate the bones!") He also pops a Happy Hanukkah balloon--Nazi fuck. Maybe there's meant to be an intentional play between the fun of the party and stark '80s New York apathy of these other scenes. It's not played up that way, though. It feels more like someone just had an accident with the editing machine.

Incidentally. With that facial structure, that voice, that weight, the AFABness and the antisemitism--my God, Farkas is actually Crazy Fat Ethel, isn't he? He found his true self in that stock footage mental hospital from the end of Criminally Insane 2! I knew the story continued! Now we just need a movie explaining the Janowski family tensions between Ethel/Farkas and his sister, Edith Mortley RN.

Then there's the supernatural stuff. Pappas ends up with the planchette at one point, but he tries to use it to figure out the next day's lottery numbers. Because that's what communing with the dead is for. He is attacked by slimy rubber kids' toys, who start drinking his blood; when he tries to cut them off with a knife he just ends up mutilating himself instead. Then there's Jennifer's visions. She sees a shitty-looking corpse on TV, a clawed boogeyman at the window, and finally the zombie of her landlord. At the end there's another bad-looking rubber corpse who we get to see in even more detail. All they could afford was rubber and slime. Frankly though, that's all you need to make a great horror film.

There's just one more thing I want to comment on. When Jennifer says she has a surprise, her husband rolls his eyes and murmurs, "Antique pistols." What?! Why would he think that's what she had? Did he think she was challenging him to a duel? Is showing off one's antique pistols a common occurrence in this couple's social circle? I don't know why this baffles me so much. I can understand this from a first draft perspective--lord knows how many jokes or bit of dialogue I've written that have made sense in the moment but have proven baffling on the return run. (That's right, you guys get my good material. Crumble in despair as you consider how dire my bad shit must be.) But this was just odd. Odd in a way that I love, naturally, but odd all the same.

If you like slime and communicating with the dead, then this is the movie for you. It actually feels like a "real" thriller at times, before someone opens their mouth and says something. Professionalism is on display. But not everywhere. It's that precise and unique dichotomy that really matters.

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Wish Upon (2017), by John R. Leonetti

Comedy gold. HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!!!

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Octane (2003), by Marcus Adams

Those goshdarn hifalutin' whippersnapper young people! Back in my day we didn't disrespect or disobey our parents, no sir. Almost a relief when these young folks get kidnapped by random highway-dwelling Satanic cults, dontchaknow?

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The Abomination (1986), by Bret McCormick

SPOOKYWEEN HAS BEGUN!! I hope you're ready to get messy--with the gross and gory myriad mouths of THE ABOMINATION!

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Rabid Grannies (1988), by Emmanuel Kervyn

A comedy of manners set in a gloomy old house, full of black magic and blood. RABID GRANNIES!

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Book Club of Desolation #23: Powers of Darkness (1900-1901), by Valdimar Asmundsson and Bram Stoker (?)

In 2014, Icelandic scholar Hans Corneel de Roos was looking over a manuscript from the turn of the 20th Century that at first seemed to merely be an Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, penned by writer Valdimar Asmundsson. However, he started to notice that the manuscript, entitled Makt Myrkranna or Powers of Darkness, made some substantial deviations from Stoker's original text, and it didn't take long to realize that the book was something new entirely, although it was based on Dracula. The resultant text was made available in English with notes by both de Roos and Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker. Makt Myrkranna is simultaneously an awesome part of horror fiction history, a superior novel to Stoker's tale, and a suggestion of a possibility I've thought about for a long time: what if there are more books like this one, which serve as alternate versions of more famous works?

The story of Powers of Darkness roughly follows that of Dracula, but it bears repeating for the sake of this review. Jonathan--or excuse me, Thomas Harker is an English real estate agent called out to Transylvania by a mysterious noble named Count Dracula, who is interested in buying property in London. Harker is warned by everyone he encounters along the way that Dracula is pure evil, but he must carry on with his job. You see, Harker is kind of an idiot--even moreso than in Stoker's novel. Dracula is an amiable enough fellow but his castle looks like no one's lived in it properly for centuries. He also gets a hungry look in his eye when he sees Harker cut himself. Pretty standard Stoker stuff so far, but Stoker never mentioned Dracula's triumphant pride in the incestuous of his family, which produces short-lived, stumpy freaks. Nor did he mention Dracula's underground chamber where he and his gorilla-man army sacrifice villagers to Satan. Nor did he mention that Dracula and said gorilla-man army are in league with a conspiracy of noblemen who want to destroy the democratic processes of England to create a world where the serfs serve the nobles again! (I guess Dracula never heard of Wall Street, then.) Will Harker be able to escape Dracula's horrifying fortress to warn his beloved Wilma, or will he be food for Dracula's vampire brides?

"But wait!" you ask. "What about Holmwood and Quincy Morris and Lucy and van Helsing? What about, y'know, the other three-quarters of the novel?" Well, that's the thing about Powers of Darkness: most of the book is Harker trying to survive his weeks in Dracula's castle. There is a second part which features most of the same events as Dracula--the arrival of van Helsing, the vampirism and staking of Lucy/Lucia, the menace hanging over Mina/Wilma, and finally the battle against Dracula and his servants in the shadow of the vampire's castle. Where the end changes is that Dracula's castle crumbles upon his death, and then the nobles who allied themselves with him commit suicide or are murdered, ending his conspiracy. As the introduction and notes posit, this part was likely meant as an outline for what Asmundsson would write later, suggesting that Powers of Darkness in its complete form (assuming that we have today isn't the complete form) would have dwarfed Dracula in length and complexity. As it stands already, Asmundsson's text succeeds at being far scarier than Dracula, perhaps because of its choice to frontload.

Asmundsson understood the Harker parts had the best potential for horror. Dracula's wild, rambling structure gives it the feeling more of an adventure novel than a Gothic piece, which is awkward because it's told, as Powers of Darkness is, through letters and diary entries. It's weird to hear the tale of a frantic carriage chase recounted post-facto in a journal. But the bulk of Powers of Darkness reads like something someone found in Dracula's castle next to Thomas Harker's emaciated corpse--you never know which entry is going to be the last. This is broken only somewhat by the fact that, again, Harker is a massive idiot, as he pointedly does not try to leave the castle until it's nearly too late, even after witnessing Satanic rituals in progress! He is remarkably tolerant of many horrifying supernatural incidents. Sometimes, though, justifying logic breaks through. After all, it's probably more than Harker feels he can't leave the castle, as it's on a high rocky pass in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wolves and God knows what else. There's also the fact that he came here to do a job, and at least at the beginning, much of his response to the ghoulish things he encountered is a very natural sort of confusion--perhaps he's imagining things, or maybe this is some local custom he as a privileged Londoner doesn't understand. Even if he trusts his instincts when he is sure the supernatural is afoot, he can't exactly return to his boss in England emptyhanded and tell him, "Sorry, the client was a Satanic vampire with a gorilla-man army which he was gonna use to tear down the government, no sale."

Now, this book would not be complete without the introduction and notes it provides. Dacre Stoker's introduction was interesting in its argument that Makt Myrkranna was based on Bram Stoker's private notes, and that Stoker and Asmundsson collaborated in the latter's penning of Powers. He brings up the fact that it was popular for Victorian authors to travel to Iceland, as they admired Iceland's astonishing poetic tradition; he also points out that several details from Powers match with unused story bits from Stoker's notes, such as the "hidden red room" where Dracula performs his evil magic, and the blind-mute woman who serves the vampire. However, I would caution against assuming that works such as these are made with the collaboration of the original author, because certain tropes are universal, and there are such things as coincidences. Respect the fanfic, I guess is what I'm saying. On my first read-through of the introduction I was disappointed that Dacre Stoker generally abstained from praising Asmundsson's individual creativity in the parts of Powers that weren't seemingly based on his great-granduncle's work, but a closer look-through on my part shows the integrity of his investigation. Similarly, I found de Roos' footnotes to be cluttery and intrusive at times, but they form a log of the challenges he ran into in translating early 20th Century Icelandic into English. When I studied linguistics I found the bond between Icelandic and English one of the most fascinating my professors discussed: modern Icelandic and Old English are extremely similar. In fact one of my professors told me that if an Anglo-Saxon time-traveler from pre-Norman England landed in today's Iceland they'd probably be able to have a reasonable conversation with someone there.

Overall, this new edition of Makt Myrkranna is an awesome look at vampire fiction history, and one of what I hope will be many discoveries of other pseudo-classics cloned from books that history remembered better. And, similarly, it's better than the original Dracula. Horror fans can't afford to miss out.

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Book Club of Desolation #19: Left Behind (1995), by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

Disclaimer: If you are a person whose beliefs generally align with the views put forward in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series--i.e. you are a premillenialist dispensationalist Evangelical Christian--you probably will not want to read this review. If you are a fan of their prose I recommend similar caution. This is because whether you find such an action justifiable on my behalf or not, I am about to, as the expression sometimes goes, rip this book a new one.

And before I continue with this next entry in our Bookvember adventure, I want to give a secondary disclaimer to those of you who don't buy into the Left Behind mythos: I don't have anything against mainstream Christianity. While I have my own beliefs and I will confess that those beliefs sometimes rub up against Christianity, I recognize that typical Christian beliefs in the United States are relatively non-toxic. I write this with the recognition that there's no avoiding discomfort in a review such as this--but I really do have to share my opinions on this book, for the reaction it elicited in me.

Left Behind, for those of you unaware, is a series telling the tale of those "left behind" to face the Great Tribulation after the Rapture takes the forgiven to Heaven. In a general sense, the first book establishes the premise of the series while introducing our principle characters. There are the members of what will be called the Tribulation Force (a league of faithful Antichrist-fighters), and their allies: we focus primarily on adulterer pilot Rayford Steele and a reporter named Cam "Buck" Williams. There is a plot about how in the early days of the Rapture, an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig figured out to fertilize desert sands without irrigation; for this, Israel suffered a massive assault from post-Soviet Russia, wherein not a single person was killed, apparently by the hand of God. In the wake of the Rapture the social order has developed further from this, moving towards a UN-led one-world government under the command of charismatic young Romanian politician Nicolae Carpathia. Carpathia--if you couldn't tell from the name--is the Antichrist, and our heroes of the Tribulation Force slowly uncover the conspiracy he's set in place to ensure the rise of his dominion.

Here's the thing about Left Behind: it is not an inherently bad idea. There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of a Rapture story--perhaps because of the Left Behind series, there has been an embrace of the idea in pop culture, regardless of the degree of religious intent in its presentation. Both as a secular and religious idea, Left Behind has potential. If you want to tell a more secularized version of the story, you'd have your basic Post-Apocalyptic model, with some potential for fantasy exploration--you could pit your characters against demons, for example. You could keep it ambiguous if it's the Biblical End-of-the-World or just an event that resembles such. And if you wanted to tell it as a story meant to convert people to Christianity, that could work just as well! Christianity guiding principle is ostensibly salvation, and so even if it jiggles the rules on the Apocalypse a little bit--have a story where our heroes are saved by their actions in the face of their final test! Left Behind thinks it's telling the latter story (and I'm sure at least some of the heroes go to Heaven in the end), but like a lot of works by Evangelicals, where it chooses to put its focus is where it becomes a thing of malice rather than mercy.

The issue with any sort of Rapture story is that the idea of a Rapture is inherently exclusionary. Typically, the estimates on the total of souls allowed into God's Kingdom by Rapture-believers represent a distinct minority of the human race. This usually contrasts the pop culture depiction of the Rapture wherein enough people are gone that society as we know it has collapsed. That was what I was expecting in Left Behind--cities on fire, planes crashing to the ground, power outages, cats and dogs living together...mass hysteria. Instead, the basic economy stays intact, airlines stay open, there is comparatively little social strife en masse...almost implying that few people were taken to Heaven in the end. And we do get specifics on who was taken, and who wasn't.

To begin with, all fetuses are taken to Heaven. This is a prelude to the scene wherein we learn about the abortion clinics who encourage people to get pregnant and have abortions just so they can stay in business. And the people who get pregnant and abort just for fun. I've already opened enough Pandora's Boxes, so I'm not going to go much further with this thread, but if the authors actually believe these clinics and people exist, that is absolutely repugnant of them. At best, they are emotionally manipulative; and frankly, folks, I'm just tired of all this hand-wringing hate against women who just don't want or can't have children.

Then there is the telling passage where we are learning about how babies and children almost universally vanished. That is a bit more bearable to me because it's less emotionally manipulative; then they say "even a few teenagers" were Raptured. That's some pretty telling phrasing there. Whether it's the opinion of the character saying that or the voice of the authors speaking through them, someone in the equation believes all but a few teenagers are so corrupt that they deserve eternal torture. I could dig my grave even deeper by wondering why any of these people deserve eternal torture for things like adultery or looking at porn (or "magazines which fed my lust," as the milquetoast prose would have it), but the more I tried to avoid looking for stereotypical opinions in the book, the more I found them. Of course the two old white Evangelicals writing about the Apocalypse believe that once puberty hits you you're worthy of damnation. Why would adolescent mistakes be forgiven by an all-benevolent deity, amirite?

I also don't really need to say that the book is racist, but when you've got a whole lot of celebration over Jews converting to spread the word of Christ, it's a little hard to avoid. Similarly, a lot of attention is drawn to the fact that the Antichrist is Romanian. Fiction is a slippery thing, in that it doesn't always represent the heart and soul of the creator, but if you do something too many times it's going to seem like a telling statement. I don't entirely know why LaHaye and Jenkins think Eastern Europeans are so sinister but it gets draining quickly.

Really, that's my issue with Left Behind: I went into it expecting better. The series is probably the most famous line of distinctly-genred "Christian fiction" books I know, and consequently, I was expecting something milder, more optimistic. And more convincing, because if Christian fiction is truly Christian it won't merely be entertaining. This sort of fiction should be convincing people to join up with what the authors (think they) practice, but instead it frames such a choice as one motivated by fear and exclusion. What is more is that, like a lot of the movies we've seen hitting theaters recently, it attempts to preemptively dismiss those who disagree with its view. This is not inherently an unsound argument strategy--you can toss out an opposing argument before it's aired, but it depends on how much you strawman your opposition, and how expertly you expose the irrelevance of such opposition. Near the end, the characters dismiss moderate Christians and their refusal to focus on the real problems of judging drug-users, abortion-havers, and porn-readers simply because the authors make them dismiss such people. After all, people, this is the Antichrist on the line, people!

Let's talk about this Antichrist. Nicolae Carpathia. What frustrates me is that that name is almost genius. He sounds like a fucking Doc Savage villain, and in a melodramatic, over-the-top pulpy atmosphere a character with that name could be used brilliantly. But this is meant to instead be a "subtle" tip-off that the head of the UN is the Son of Satan himself. The more I read that name the more I felt like the authors thought I was an idiot--that I couldn't figure out this guy was the Antichrist unless his name was some equivalent of "Damien Draculaston." I suspect from a certain point of view they do view their readers as not overly clever; that's why we're informed that Carpathia's enemies are heroic (i.e. masculine) via the fact that they have names like Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Dirk Burton, and of course, Steve Plank. Maybe it's, yknow, "Plawnck," like the scientist, but if they mean like a plank of wood then it sounds like something Mike and the Bots would have called Reb Brown during Space Mutiny. If I can carry this tangent further, I have to comment on the fact that Rayford Steele's loved ones call him not "Ray" but "Rafe." "Rayford" is bad enough, but what could compel a writer to pen a series featuring a man named "Rafe Steele" as the protagonist?

Returning, though, to Carpathia--no, his name was not the only beef I had with him. Repetitious padding is what comprises most of Left Behind, but you will get so tired of hearing how Carpathia is handsome, famous, charming, the Sexiest Man Alive (which gets played up a huge deal), and 33 years old. Yes, I get it, he's 33 because that's how old Jesus was when he died--now I officially never want to read the words "33 years old" ever again. Then, the authors describe him on several occasions as "blond Robert Redford." NO. That is dishonest writing. If your fallback for physically describing your character is to compare them to a celebrity, you need another draft at best. Carpathia is set up to be charismatic because, as per the Christian tradition, he is a honey-not-vinegar sort of Antichrist, so nice and likable and talented that no one ever criticizes him, which is definitely an accurate and realistic view of humanity. We totally have people and things in our culture which are never criticized by anybody, right? In choosing this approach for him as a character, the authors make him come across as obviously evil--literally too good to be true. We humans wouldn't react to a man like him with adoration: we'd ask what he's selling.

Of course, another (possibly) unintended effect is that the book seems to encourage suspicion of those who bring peace and innovation. People have applied the idea of a charismatic and likable Antichrist to real figures all throughout history--"Of course Obama created a health care system which benefited millions! Giving you what you want is how the Devil hooks yeh." The message seems to be that political allegiances between nations, like the UN, are steps towards an order which will be easy for the Antichrist to rule. Consequently, it also warns us of figures in power bearing messages of pacifism. Admittedly, there have been real dictators who have abused our desire for peace to unleash terrible war--whether it's tricking us into thinking a war will bring peace or lying about their intent until their power is secured. But I've seen that fear used as an excuse to fight vague threats--somehow the presence of a supposed Antichrist induces moral corruption, but the definition of "corruption" and how it manifests often seems as vague and nebulous as the present definition of "political correctness." You get people believing that literally every politician is the Spawn of Satan and then you get people voted in who are going to make sure there's no education system to tell them otherwise. But I digress.

Eos, bring the dawn; Athena, heal my brain. Left Behind was disappointingly paranoid, misogynist, and boring. If you love reading books where the same details are repeated until they become meaningless, this may be your book. Christians deserve better fiction than this, in terms of both theme and writing quality. Dodge it like it'll burn you--and don't let yourself settle for this!

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The Ghost of Rashmon Hall (1947), by Denis Kavanagh

Frankly, if I like this, I'm an idiot. Some permutation of that supposition comes up basically every third review at this point, but c'mon. They couldn't even get the name of the house right in the title. Let's just get out of the way, because all the other reviews of this movie (all three of them) all make light of this: the house in the movie is called Rammelsham Hall, not Rashmon Hall. Yes, yes, that's a problem with the U.S. distribution title and the movie is really called Night Comes Too Soon; but this is proof nonetheless that The Ghost of Rashmon Hall starts with idiocy, and ends with idiocy. This is a movie where I like it not for its entertainment value, but for what it makes as a summary statement. I.e. I don't like it as a movie, I like it as the idea of a movie. This is a theme which will repeat in Wednesday's review, too, which is a movie which I only enjoy for the first few minutes! But sometimes, you have to let yourself miss the forests for the trees. Let's find out why exactly Rashmon Hall is a mess even outside of its title.

The plot is extremely basic. A group of friends have met up at old Rammelsham Hall and are waiting on the last of their group, Dr. Clinton. When he finally arrives, they begin talking about ghost stories, and Clinton informs them that the very house they are presently sitting in is haunted. He begins to tell the tale of his young friends John and Phyllis, whose story we will follow for the rest of the film, save for occasional interruptions from Dr. Clinton. The young couple are looking for a new home to move into after being married, but there's a significant scarcity of available houses. The world's most poorly-acted real estate agent lets them know that he does have one other property for sale, but he seems very hesitant to send it off. It could have something to do with the fact that the cornerstone of the house not only gives the name of the house's builder and first inhabitant, Rinaldo Sabata (presumably a relative of the Western gunfighter), but it states that the occupation of that same man was "Necromancer"! As Clinton's narration says: "A necromancer is one who draws power from evil"--or, y'know, the dead, but semantics schmemantics. Anyway, the two begin to notice strange phenomenon in the house. Mysterious shadows, auto-kinetic doors, unexplained noises--the usual. It gets so bad that eventually John calls in Dr. Clinton, who helps him learn the house's secret. Rinaldo Sabata's wife took on a sailor as a lover, and Sabata killed them both and chained their ghosts and his own to the house. By destroying a compass (?) the curse is lifted and the spirits can move on. Back in the present, Clinton's guests refuse to believe the tale, until Clinton reveals that he himself is a ghost--

Hang on.

So let me get this straight. A man who has known almost every character in the film for years has been dead this whole time?! How does that make any sort of sense? As far as I remember, John and/or Phyllis were once Clinton's students...was he a ghost back then, too? The only way I feel this can work is if Clinton died on his way to the party at Rammelsham, but there's nothing to imply that in the script except for the fact that he shows up late. And even then, that's such a glancing detail that there was no way for an audience, starved of the ability to rewind and replay things, to pick that up in 1947. Maybe this is supposed to be like a comedy, where the last scene is "non-canon"; it's just meant to be a last "note" before the movie ends. But I can't buy into that because that's lazy filmmaking. Of course, it's not like this film isn't lazy to begin with.

In my Phantom of the Convent review, I briefly touched on the particular brand of mildness found in British horror films from the '30s and '40s. I also talked about how Mexican movies tend to draw on the mythology of Mexico's European heritage in a way that American movies tended to avoid. Ultimately, I feel the same principle applies to many European movies, even beyond the 1940s. Many of them adapt an Old World story with comparatively few embellishments. Consider, for example, the filmography of Britain's foremost horror star, Tod Slaughter. His most famous role is from the 1936 Sweeney Todd adaptation; while his other big roles in movies like Maria Marten and Crimes in the Dark House are based off of lurid true events of the 19th Century or else mid-Victorian literature. Presumably this was to facilitate audience familiarity with the material so they weren't baffled by things like vampire ghost dogs. In British movies, too, there's a sense of theatricality, audience participation, and general "merriment"; the fact that Tod Slaughter's movies are usually described as melodramas rather than horror films, despite their horror elements, is a testament to a difference in how Brits prefer or preferred their ghost stories. One has to remember that until comparatively recently, telling ghost stories was a tradition of Christmas--consider of course the famous Dickens novel, but also the reference to "scary ghost stories" in "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Horror to the Brits was a sign of comfort, perhaps because of its ability to bring people closer together. And thus is Ghost of Rashmon Hall a deliberately straightforward creaky old horror story, with, again, few embellishments beyond basic ghost tropes. It even bills itself as "a plain down-to-Earth" ghost story, such as that written by "Lord Lytton," alias Edward "Dark and stormy night" Bulwer-Lytton. Indeed, this movie is ostensibly adapted from Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunters and the Haunted," with the point of the haunting stemming from an object which must be destroyed to lay the ghosts to rest being one of the story's few points left intact by the movie. Much else is changed: the circumstances of who the ghosts are is different, and the main characters in the film are a married couple instead of the short story's solitary narrator. And of course there are no flashbacks to one of the characters telling the story in the house's parlor in Bulwer-Lytton's piece. But indeed, both tales are very plain ghost stories, such as those which British melodrama audiences would enjoy. At least until the ending, in the film's case.

I was fascinated by how this movie reminded me of other movies. The basic premise, of course, is a prototype for The Amityville Horror, which serves to remind me how truly lazy the Amityville story was. However, its use and overuse of shadow, plus some legitimately spooky imagery--and the fact that I liked it--reminded me of Ghosts of Hanley House. I feel the two would make a pretty solid double-feature. But weirdly, one movie which it reminded me of in particular is Byron Quisenberry's The Outing, which I'll review at some point. That's another movie which is almost needlessly slow, that refuses to innovate or stand out no matter what. Yet, it manages to generate genuine creepiness, and is unexplained in a way that leaves you wanting to rewatch it. In particular, the final shot, where we pan slowly to a wine glass just before it shatters under an invisible force, reminds me of the weird final shot of The Outing where we slowly pan over to the painting which may or may not reveal who the killer is. I plan on rewatching Ghost of Rashmon Hall a few more times to see if there's anything I missed. I strongly doubt it, but we'll see.

Unfortunately, the key to that bizarro ending may be lost forever. Supposedly the film originally ran 57 minutes, but it was cut down to 49 minutes for American release, and the original British version was subsequently lost. Lost films will always bug me, no matter how insignificant they are. The Ghost of Rashmon Hall is as insignificant as it gets, but I fully believe those eight minutes probably had something good on them.

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Satan's Black Wedding (1975), by Nick Millard

Nick Millard returns again! This is probably his best film. It feels the most like an actual movie, even moreso than the already-impressive Criminally Insane. From here, Millard's cinematic output becomes no less amazing, but decidedly cheaper--and while Satan's Black Wedding does run into cheap territory at times, it is a wonderfully atmospheric vampire film that rivets you down for a vastly entertaining 60 minutes.

Hollywood actor Mark Gray has been called back to his hometown of Monterey after the untimely death of his sister Nina. The circumstances of her death are rather mysterious--she apparently committed suicide, but all the blood was removed from her body post-mortem, and her finger was cut off. Interrogating his sick aunt, Mark learns that Nina started going back to the abandoned church that they both feared as children, to ostensibly research a book she was writing on "High Satanic Rites." Similarly, the local police detective says that her death was one of many such brutal fatalities afflicting the town--one of these victims had swatches of 200-year-old cloth gripped between their fingers, their face frozen in horror. We the audience already know by now that the local priest, Father Dakin, is a vampire...and so is Nina. Mark will have to fight hard to escape the bloody grip of Satan.

There's a lot that I can praise about Satan's Black Wedding. I haven't watched it as much as Criminally Insane, but I have probably seen it about two dozen times, so it's still up there in turns of ranked rewatches. First of all, let's talk about how it works as a horror film. There's plenty of creepy stuff here. The opening scenes set in the tomb definitely stand out, with Father Dakin whispering "Sanctus diabolis" from the darkness as Nina mutilates herself with a razor. The entire movie is wracked with an audio hiss that highlights "s"-sounds, which actually heightens the spookiness of these Latin whispers; cheapness comes to the rescue. This follows our opening credits, which feature not only a freaky painting but some nicely atmospheric freaky music as well. Most of the movie's first twenty minutes, which set up the various facts of the world these vampires live in, are effectively mysterious, leaving us wanting to know more even though it's not really a mystery what's going on. And the scene where vampire!Nina slowly creeps into her aunt's bedroom is notable to me as well.

The acting, also, is generally pretty good. Nick Millard got someone to competently and convincingly cry on camera! That makes him better than a whole fucking lot of big-name Hollywood directors. I can't think of anyone who does a shit job per se, aside from maybe Mark's aunt's housekeeper, who has to give an extremely phony/racist Latina accent. It may not be great, but there is one performer in particular who I have to give a shout-out to: Ray Myles, who plays Father Dakin. Maybe someday I'll do a Ray Myles appreciation essay. He shows up in a lot of Millard's other movies, and has some bit parts in movies like The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (two titles which just roll off your tongue). I want to know what acting school he went to, because his English accent is one of the most refined I've ever heard. He's a wonderful man to listen to, and an astoundingly controlled actor. Listening to him recite "Dies Irae" at the end sends shivers down my spine. He is too good, and more people should know about him.

Not everything is perfect, but what movie is? The vampires' teeth look incredibly silly, mostly because they also include bottom teeth, giving the impression that they have tusks, or perhaps hillbilly teeth, rather than fangs. Plus, Mark is a moron for not immediately realizing that Dakin is a Satanic vampire--clergymen typically don't get happily excited when recounting the victories of the Devil. So there's a little bit of Idiot Ball play at work here in the script, which is never good. And finally, there's a scene with a policeman who was clearly spliced into the action much later, at a different shooting location. You'll know it when you see it--it's flagged by the fact that it will make you laugh your ass off. There's a very similar scene in Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge, featuring the policeman "Kline" who makes a bizarrely pointless appearance via extra-locational splicing, which is a great moment in the MST3K episode for such. Was Millard homaging Wood? The world will never know!!!! (He wasn't.)

But the faults blend in well with the rest of this movie. Everything feels coherent and complete. This is a must-see for the Millard initiate, and indeed for Millard fans as well. It never hurts to burn an hour!

P.S. HAPPY 100 REVIEWS! (Not counting Retrospectives, otherwise we would have passed this 57 movies ago.) I don't think I coulda picked a better director to commemorate a hundred reviews with than Nick Millard. Plus, it bodes well that this was also the week I got to see Jungle Trap. Here's to a hundred more!

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Psyched by the 4D Witch (1972), by "Victor Luminera"

Okay, I'm starting to think I just like stupid shit.

What would happen if the people who made A Clockwork Blue had even more weed but even less money? If such a thing did exist, and it was a horror film as well as a softcore porn, it would be one of the best horror porn films ever. How fortunate! Our universe also contains such a movie. No, none of the same people from A Clockwork Blue were actually involved with the creation of Psyched by the 4D Witch, but that doesn't matter. "Victor Luminera" and his band of merry persons were simultaneously dumber and more brilliant than the crew of that film. After all, one of the few of their number to get a credit is named "Esoterica," and she along with many others brings us this Tale of Demonology by way of Transetheric Vision. Transetheric Vision is extremely grainy and looks like a lot of shots of masks being waved around behind a red filter. Indeed, there are many shots of floating masks being waved around behind red filters in this film. And to think that that's just the start of it.

A girl named Cindy studies sexual witchcraft in her spooky old house, which summons her Salemite ancestress, a witch named Abigail. Abigail makes a deal Cindy can't refuse--she'll teach her the secrets of magical sex and give her orgasms, while keeping her "a virgin for [her] daddy." An increasingly disturb string of sexual escapades ensues, triggered by Abigail's magic words: "Let's fantasy fuck now." What starts out as simple things like masturbation and fucking gay guys straight leads to more terrifying reaches, like lesbianism, sexual vampirism, and the ol' snake-up-the-rectum. Toothpaste-rabies ghouls dominate the second half, after Cindy is sealed away for disobeying Abigail after the "Salem witch-bitch" tries to get her to screw not just a corpse...but a female corpse! Have I mentioned that this movie is absolutely traumatized by the existence of gay people? Anyway, in the end, straight sex in the material world is what Cindy needs to break Abigail's spell, so she's off to the races fucking her best friend's German psychiatrist dad. But can anyone truly stop a witch who lives in a dimension beyond our understanding...?

I can't entirely do this movie justice, and I already expended my use of the word "psychedelic" in the review for The Witches' Mountain. Which is sad, and a grievous error on my behalf, because this movie stops at nothing to bring us a full rainbow of colors. Beyond the trippy visuals (and audio, and plot, and...), there is much on display here. Particularly, I want to point out that this movie probably has the most stereotypical and awful piece of "Chinatown" stock music ever. It comes out of nowhere and is, like many things in the movie, hilarious, but also offensive. Many things as weird and unnecessary as this occur, and these "things" are surrounded by a story that sound like a pulp written jointly by Anton LaVey and Kenneth Anger. It is miraculous.

I should also talk about the soundtrack of this movie (outside of the racist Chinese music). It's one of many '60s/'70s exploitation movies that have made to the A-List that heavily samples "A Night on Bald Mountain." Bald Mountain is played almost as much as the lyrical theme music that recurs throughout, which repeatedly warns us that the 4D witch is "born from the belly of the devil's bitch." You will hear this song so much that you will begin to love it, even though it is Stockholm Syndrome. It's great to have an ineptly written and performed song play so many times in such an ineptly written and performed movie.

Psyched by the 4D Witch is unlike The Witches' Mountain in that it condemns rather than condones intellectual analysis. It is pure fluff, it is comfort, and it is thus probably bad for you. Mountain may be psychedelia's intuitive processes laid bare, but Psyched is its mindless bubbly idiot joy. In its stupidity it really is something to gawk at rather than truly entertain. But I'm entertained by gawking, and perhaps I make true the old principle that you are what you eat. For I "eat" stupid shit like this, down to the bone. I have now seen this movie probably as many times as I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate or Don't Go in the Woods, and I have seen those movies probably about thirty times each. I feel like that makes me a bad person.

I suspect you are a good person, and so I want to do you some good. It's with that in mind that I will say that if you tend to adore exclusively "normal" movies, this one may make you puke. But I'm sure someone somewhere has said that the goal of cinema is to evoke a reaction. Puking is a reaction.

If you have to puke, puke to this movie.

Bad Magic (1998), by Mark and Jon Polonia

I cannot say that it's right for me to go into a description of why this movie makes me Super Happy, and not just regular Happy. It is made by the Polonia Brothers, who are Trash Kings of the Universe Forever. Describing their legacy is something better saved for their most infamous effort, 1987's Splatter Farm, which is also one of my favorites. This one isn't as good as Splatter Farm in my mind, because it's not as grotesque and shocking as that film. All the same, it is grotesque and shocking as far as production quality, special effects, acting, editing, and relevance/semblance to real life go. Plus, I remembered it because I needed a double feature with my rewatch of Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. Bad Magic is Witchdoctor of the Living Dead made by Americans. It has the same frenetic jerkiness. The same emphasis on black magic as told through an anarchic dismissal of the idea of magic having rules. The same impossibly shitty acting. It's a blast of a nuclear variety--so let's begin our descent into a black pit called Hell.

Renny seeks to avenge his brother Amos, who was killed during a gang war. Rather than doing, say, anything but learning the secrets of black magic for revenge, his first course of action involves learning the secrets of black magic for revenge. He reads an account which creates flashbacks to the 1993 Polonia film Hellspawn. He eventually goes to "the West Indies" in search of a magician named Tobanga. Bizarrely, and perhaps upsettingly, Tobanga is a white guy. Tobanga enjoys laughter and hitting people in the face with snakes. He teaches Renny of Bluh-key-bluh-kay, the Spirit of Revenge, and gives him four magic tools with which he may destroy the Red Claws, the gang of fat nerdy guys who killed his brother. But of course, there is a price that Renny must pay when his quest for revenge ends...a quest that involves prostitutes in fake wigs, demons with Texas drawls, and toilet-paper mummies. In the end, we cannot forget what is probably the most important lesson of the film: that advertising for Les Miserables looked exactly the same in 1998 as it does in 2016.

This is a bullet-point movie--the fine details of it are best summarized and described as a string of bullet points. There are things that "happen," most or all of them hilarious. Here are some of them:

•  First of all I want to say that the guy who plays Renny is the worst actor of all time. The absolute worst. He is constantly bored and/or stoned, moreso even than Ted from Crypt of Dark Secrets. He is bored by drinking a god's blood and by being attacked by snakes, and he completely destroys a very workable script. He does a killer evil laugh, though, which gives us the impression that even if revenge didn't play a part, Renny would kill people anyway, for fun. Which is, of course, inconsistent with the ending. I am deeply saddened that this actor, Vincent Simmons, has no other credits to his name--a name that should be praised.  
• Renny tries to bribe Tobanga to train him when the latter initially refuses to do so. The two bills he throws at him are clearly ones. I like to think that in the universe of this movie Renny did really try to bribe Tobanga for two dollars, and this isn't supposed to be some representational theatre thing.
• This movie probably has the same soundtrack as High Kicks. Prepare for a '90s-gasm, which is like an orgasm but with mullets. Except unlike High Kicks, it also has shitty '90s video graphixxx, which doubles the awesome.  
• There is some unfortunately real animal violence (a snake eating a mouse). Luckily, there is enough hilarity involving snakes that you will still love snakes after the movie.  
• Learning the black arts involves passing boxes back and forth between your hands and picking up bottles off of desks, says this film. This is sacrosanct fact in the school of evil wizards.  
• In Hell the demons will grab your mullet, and they will tug on it as they whip you! It's all you deserve for growing the fucking thing. That's probably why you went to Hell to begin with.
• For some reason Renny uses a lot of paired nouns in his expositions voiceovers, specifically ones refer to Bad Shit. "Violence and bloodshed," "bloodshed and death," "corruption and wickedness." It forms its own weird meter that quickly becomes funny, in both senses of that word.

That's it, really. It is a short film, which perhaps pushes me into the Hyper Happy regions--if you take out the credits it's about a minute over an hour. That shortness probably points to one of the things that makes Bad Magic great: its poverty. I sincerely suspect Renny's two-dollar bribe was the sum of what they used to make this, and because there was no money involved there was also no reason not to take risks and go bananas. And take those banana-gone risks the filmmakers did, unleashing a demon unto the world like the characters they chronicled. The only pitfall here is some slight boredom and padding--that is what drags it below Splatter Farm for me, though Splatter Farm certainly slows down sometimes.

The Polonias will undoubtedly return. Sometime soon we'll see Splatter Farm and perhaps another old gem, Night Crawlers. But don't make me choose between them! The Polonia films are all precious. If these movies were taken from me by someone, I, too, would commit Renny's sins, and spectral revenge would be upon the thieves for the awful thing they did.

Hack-o-Lantern (1988), by Jag Mundhra

The worst part of reviewing these movies is describing them.

As I've said many times before, the goal of the A-List is to spread awareness of trash movies with the hopes that people will check 'em out and, ideally, reconstruct their notions of "good" and "bad" movies. Because these movies subvert and play with all of the cinematic conventions we've grown comfortable on (being sheltered since childhood in a Plato's Cave of exclusively good movies...usually), putting them in precisely-defined terms is the most important part of "selling" their value. (More a spiritual and emotional value than a capitalist one, to be sure.) While it is easy for me to simply proclaim the greatness of these films, that method is not effective. And there's always an unsteady balance between revealing the fun and spoiling it. But what complicates the issue further is that there is always an indescribable aura of good in them. An intrinsic sweet substance that flows richly from them, that touch the heart and destabilize the mind. Maybe it's masochistic guilt, or sadistic schadenfreude against the poor souls who tore their chests open to the world and fell so hard. Or soared so high.

Today's movie, fortunately, is one that presents that magic, invisible "trash feeling," while also being easily comparable to "bad movies" that people have a high chance of having already seen. I've heard people compare it to Troll 2. Both are distinctly products of the late '80s/early '90s. Both had foreign directors directing American casts (Indian and Italian, respectively). Both are fucking incredible. Good news, at this point in history statistically you probably either have seen Troll 2 or know someone who can show it to you! That will lead easily in Hack-o-Lantern. Following Hack-o-Lantern may have to be James Bryan's Don't Go in the Woods, or maybe Furious. The goal is to get you to like Manos: The Hands of Fate, and then send you down into Ax 'Em, and finally Hip Hop Locos. It's nearly impossible to get any sort of enjoyment out of what waits on deeper levels, like After Last Season, Where the Dead Go to Die, and Alien Beasts. Love is not applicable to them. They are not even movies. They are Creatures.

This movie gets off to a great start--we have a relatively innocent setup where a young boy named Tommy meets with his grandfather, who is very sweet, if overdramatic and possessed of a voice that sounds like Beetlejuice after six packs of Red Apple cigarettes. Of course, he is a Satanist, who teaches Tommy that blood tastes good and drinking it makes you healthy. Also, he kills Tommy's father by burning him alive. But this is just the beginning. If you think that this movie holds back its weird twists and somehow becomes normal after this intro, you are dead wrong. It's revealed that Tommy's grandpa is incredibly open about being a Satanist, and apparently happily revealed to his daughter that he killed her husband. He even keeps one of his bones on a necklace, which he shows off to her while groping her. It is a scene that is gross by default, true, but the whiplash pacing, poorly-chosen soundtrack, absurd line delivery, and unsettling stylistic changes (rustic thriller to Hammer Horror to POV '80s slasher depending on the scene) make nothing in the film come across as truly fucked-up. It's laughs all the way through, even with some occasional slow bits. Where will Tommy's dark destiny lead him? To heavy metal? To a cool-looking demon mask and burying people alive? Or even to the horrid depths of branding someone's buttcheek with a pentagram...?!

This is one of those films where you can let it play in the background, and 90% of the time when you turn back to it, something crazy is going on. Ass-branding aside, this movie is full of nonsense. The grandpa's mouth is always of both scenery and an ever-worsening Southern accent. People have sex in a graveyard on top of one of the graves. And even dedicated fans of soap operas will be shocked and intrigued by how many times people have the same repetitive conversations about relationships. In all of this, there is perpetually a sense that everyone involved had great fun and they wanted you to have great fun as well.

The issue is, they had to get it to feature length, and thus there are a lot of shots that are just plain uninteresting. Some of them are too dark to see, and others are visually dull next to vibrant shots lit by mood lighting (such as at the Halloween party, which, like everything else in the movie, is full of EIGHTIES). So again, feel free to zone out--just expect to be dragged back in rather hurriedly when the dull shit is over!

I'm always impressed by how this movie, via having the garnishes of poor acting and all the other stuff I mentioned, manages to thrive despite being incredibly generic for an occult thriller. The scenes of Satanic rituals--and indeed, Satan himself is the evil here, because it's not like he's overdone or anything--consist of people in black robes dancing around candlelit pentagrams and drinking from chalices. That's it. It is the original, generic, archetypical "Black Mass" scene. Even the movie's tenuous link to heavy metal had been beaten to death by the '80s by the time this movie came out. Do not come here looking for an original story. The presentation of the story is what matters, because they did indeed manage to fumble literally everything. Everything except showing off lots of boobs.

That combination--failure and simplicity--make Hack-o-Lantern simultaneously charming and spooky. It's great on Halloween, as if you couldn't tell. While it will not frighten you, it may potentially give you goosebumps, which if you're like me will give your life more meaning. I live for spooky shit. I die for spooky shit. And I like laughing at this nonsense.

And sharing it with you, of course.

Hack-o-Lantern is a syzygy, a fusion of two opposites. It is both entirely relatable and entirely alien. It's something that you can jump on no matter what of stage of life you're in, as well as a gateway to something greater. Hack-o-Lantern doles out perspective, and through perspective, we have understanding. And understanding leads to a better world.

The Soultangler (1987), by Pat Bishow

"After life--after death--the madness begins!"

And what great madness it is. Long Island is a place I've never visited, but want to go to now more than ever. That may be odd for some people (including Long Islanders themselves), but I have always seen it as a faerie-tale world by way of infamous teenage director Nathan Schiff. Schiff, who will inevitably appear on this site at some point, created four films of bizarre and disgusting elegance, beginning with Weasels Rip My Flesh in 1979 and ending with Vermilion Eyes in 1991 (he did also make 1993's The Last Heterosexual and 2008's Abracadaver, but I haven't found the former and the latter lacks the magic). Schiff's films are surreal, intellectual, and vomit-inducing, and all of them have earned a special--or infamous--place in my heart. Long Island occupies that same place. Now, it seems to be a veritable nest of miracles, as today's film, The Soultangler, was also made in Long Island. It's safe that say that that particular part of New York is on its way to becoming the lunatic trash capital of the world.

Doctor Anton Lupesky has created Anphorium, a drug that allows people to transfer their souls into corpses and control them. The corpse must possess eyes for this to work, for after all, the eyes are the window to the soul. Despite his accomplishments, however, Lupesky is "evil...an agent of Sey-Tawn, if not the Devil himself," to quote his murdered lab assistant. Said assistant's daughter, Kim, tries to investigate the circumstances behind her father's death. Kim is an incredibly cool lady. When her boss at the paper doesn't listen to her, she hangs up his phone call to yell at him. She also smokes cigarettes, which the movie reminds us of many times. Slowly, we learn that Lupesky really is evil, as evidenced by the goofy faces he makes as he covers himself in skull-blood, and by the fact that believes by way of Descartes (?) that women have inferior souls. He explains the latter point when on a date with his boss. When Kim visits Lupesky he gives her Anphorium, causing her to hallucinate up some zombies. In the final showdown, almost nothing will be spared from a spattering of both gore and ludicrousness. There are zombies, including one who garrotes someone with his guts. All along the way we get a lot of talk about the soul that manages to avoid being all New Age-y and awful. I feel like it's a movie that tries to say something about the soul, but maybe doesn't.

Because of its metaphysical subject matter--or its attempts at such--Soultangler is an inherently surreal film. Shirtless men rub their hands over yellow walls. Closeups of eyes occur frequently. Stop motion abominations have tarantulas crawl on them. The stop motion in this movie, by the way, is amazing, and in fact all of the effects are. The film seems very professional: it has a full cast and crew, great cinematography, and experienced, if sometimes crazed, editing. There are still enough line flubs, acting failures, and awkward camera glances to make it clear that this was still a production made by one of us Little Guys, not a big studio. It is a mixed beast of the most entertaining sort, and it is a legitimately good movie that happens to be batshit weird. But it still all makes sense, even if you have to watch it a couple of times. But you should be doing that anyway!

I really can't allow myself to glance over the depth of the sheer oddity of this film. Much of the dialogue, especially Kim's father's narration, is incredibly over the top, to the point where it gives the movie an almost pulp-like quality. Actually, this would make an excellent villain pulp, with Doctor Lupesky, of course, as the villain. He has some creepy goons working for him, including a heroin addict who goes for the ever-creepy Texarkana Phantom Killer look from The Town That Dreaded Sundown (which, incidentally, was also used for Bruce from Nathan Schiff's Long Island Cannibal Massacre).

Then again, a pulp probably wouldn't have the trippy dream sequence where Kim is attacked by a zombie priest whose speech is slowed down and backwards. Even the Great Shit of Yore isn't perfect. And Soultangler isn't perfect either--there are some tonal transitions (usually in the form of oddly-placed comedy bits, including Three Stooges doorway schitck with Lupesky and the heroin addict), which may throw people off, even though they were great for me. And for me, at least, it probably is perfect.

It is a film that builds slowly, like a sports stadium built with too many taxpayer dollars. In the beginning, yeah, we do get Lupesky tripping the fuck out. But it has nothing on all of the chaos of the the finale, what with its plethora of cackling faceless corpses. It is never boring because there is always something else great on the horizon, whether it be the graveyard-monologue dubs or the out-of-control latex creatures that populate this fascinating landscape.

The world of this film is a place of madness. And the madness flows richly from New York.

Long Island or bust--I'll make it someday.

P.S. This movie has a pretty rocking soundtrack. Even if the end credits music is apparently just a recording of someone puking.


I'd like to give a special shoutout to Bleeding Skull and their amazing movie label, Bleeding Skull Video. Without Bleeding Skull Video I never would have seen Soultangler, and indeed, without Bleeding Skull's amazing reviews, I wouldn't have encountered the magnificent world of trash cinema.