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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House on Haunted Hill (1999), by William Malone

That was fun, let's do it again. But this time, let's see what the '90s have to offer us when we open the doors to the HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL.

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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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Miracle in Paradise Valley (1948), by James M. Constable

Safety films, like a lot of things, work best as a story. There's no better way to drive your message home than to wrap it up in something that people can sympathize with--and if sympathy is not your aim you should at least give them something to look up to, to inspire them to change. In some ways, safety films are like propaganda, only there aren't too many folks out there wanting to suppress human rights or blow people up in the name of watching out for loose nails. Though sometimes it certainly seems like it. Most of us have, in some form or another, seen a narrative-driven safety film, through our school experiences, or through the shorts they ran at the start of Mystery Science Theater 3000. These exercises in supreme cynicism often feature implausible characters thrust into easily-written situations which yield horrifying possibilities upon the use of the most rudimentary thought. Through MST3K, the world was introduced to abominations like A Case of Spring Fever and Mr. B Natural, which featured thin stories meant to be used as skeletal supports for the ideas and ideals of the filmmakers. Miracle in Paradise Valley ramps up the narrative a little bit for a safety film, pushing it into comfortable A-List territory--it's also one of the few safety movies of its ilk I've seen that comes close to being a feature, coming up just shy of 40 minutes. On top of that, it's probably a ripoff of It's a Wonderful Life, so there's more than a little to discuss here.

John is a relatively impatient farmer who is working his way back home along a narrow ridge when his tractor engine cuts out. A mysterious man in a suit and bowler hat comes out of nowhere and shows him that if he's not too careful he's going to roll his tractor over the edge. It is here that the man demonstrates supernatural powers, knocking the tractor off the edge and then reversing the event in time--John seems to implicitly understand he's in the presence of a guardian angel. The angel calls himself "Joe, the Special In-the-Meantime Agent"; he takes care of people "in the meantime" before their death. He's decided to take care of John because he "saved him some trouble" by rescuing his fellow sailors during a torpedo incident from World War II. Thus begins John's personal Hell, as Joe begins stalking him, getting increasingly angry as John puts himself in more and more danger, and passes over each incident as unimportant. Joe's invisibility means that John ends up socially isolated when his friends hear him shout at nothing. Eventually, John is taken to a world where his apathy over safety has its consequences--most of his friends are dead, the victims of little things John never thought would matter, like rusty nails, or inappropriate use of kerosene. This leads John to decide to make his town's Safety Fair a huge success, by breaking onto people's property and planting skull-and-crossbone logos all over the place. People mock the Fair when it finally arrives but John's rabid passion whips them back in line, so they finally devote themselves to the proper cause of household accidents, and thus avert the dark future Joe showed to John.

It's kind of amazing just how perfectly this movie fits the archetype of many of the PSAs that would follow it--while also improving on the formula, by trying to give some degree of backstory to the characters by briefly describing their wartime experiences. We have a story of a man whose minor mistakes open him up to the intrusion of a supernatural presence which claims to be benevolent but gives every indication of being infernal. Said presence torments him with illusions and social stigma until he becomes a fanatic pawn of the supernatural being's personal ends. It is incredibly easy to substitute Joe with Coily the Spring Sprite, though Joe at least has a human form for us to contend with, and his concerns are ostensibly with preventing death, which contrasts Coily's mission of punishing those who don't respect springs. However, that Joe claims death as his domain makes him seem very sinister indeed. He acts like Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life, but his involvement with John's torpedo incident makes it clear he's much more like the Grim Reaper. He also says he "has many names," which is a rather Satanic proclamation. True, it's unlikely Satan would be this helpful, but we never quite get the feel that Joe's an agent of God either. He ends up with the line, "It ain't so easy putting people back together, y'know," when he reassembles John's tractor, as if he speaks from experience. Brrr.

But that's just the start. I would argue that refusing to replace one's ladder rungs is hardly a reason to teleport someone to a phantom world where all of their friends died horribly in a single year. They really pour it on once they hit this ghost world, as you might expect, not only killing a woman in a kerosene fire but forcing her husband to give up their girls to the orphanage as well--cue obligatory long-walk down the road to the orphanage door, as sad music plays. This is triggered by John asking, "But what about the kids?!" to which Joe only responds, "Oh, you'll see..." as if we're about to see a pile of severed child body parts.

Then, there's the whole deal of planting skull-and-crossbones all over people's farms. If I found a bunch of skulls all over my farm, and inside my house, I wouldn't assume it was a friendly neighbor promoting a local Safety Fair. I would assume that terrorists were threatening to kill me. Once they arrive at the Safety Fair everyone transforms their fear into bad humor. The line, "Those skulls scared my cow so bad I thought she was gonna dry up," is enough to make this audience laugh for over thirty seconds. Then Joe makes John get up onstage, and John rants like someone deep in grief--which he is, having been forced to endure the premature funerals of his friends. It culminates with John dragging out empty chairs to represent not just the dead, but "the living dead" (!!!)--that is, one person who was blinded by an accident, and another who was apparently confined to bed permanently by one. Ableism: the secret to safety. Because when you're blind or quadriplegic, you might at well be dead, right? Blehhh.

I wanted to set out in this review to dissect the forces that create films like this, but I can't help but wonder if we're witnessing a line of progression here. This movie turns It's a Wonderful Life into a PSA--which in turn may have mutated into A Case of Spring Fever. Doesn't that make a perverse kind of sense? I don't know if It's a Wonderful Life can be cited as the forerunner of this strange undercurrent/pseudogenre of "angelsploitation" but these stories are ultimately compressed and twisted versions of tales like Dickens' A Christmas Carol, wherein supernatural forces do the good which is beyond the reach of man. At least, that's the premise of Dickens' tale and It's a Wonderful Life; Scrooge will never listen to any mortal man when it comes to letting go of his miserhood, and George Bailey's values make it too hard for anyone to negotiate him out of his suicidal emotional state. Here, though, John and his friends are just kind of idiots. They could avoid using large open containers of kerosene in close proximity to burning stoves, but they're apparently just overconfident jackasses. At this point, analysis dies, because we must presume laziness propelled these emergent themes rather than intent.

I do feel rather like I'm cheating here by reviewing this, just as I did with Cyberon. But I want to say here that this movie is pretty hilarious, and while I tried to analyze it, I more wanted to recommend it. At 40 minutes, it's a frightening little chunk of fantasy ripoff that manages to imply more graphic violence than a lot of horror films. Sweet!

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Horror Express (1972), by Eugenio Martin

We're going to be doing two train movies over the next two weeks, and if you've been keeping up on things here on the A-List, you can guess what the second one is going to be. For now, we'll be covering Horror Express, a legendarily bizarre Spanish-British sci-fi movie starring Hammer greats Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Forever full of unexpected twists, Horror Express brings more than just star power to the table, and while it somehow manages to be boring at times, it's definitely not something horror fans will want to pass on.

In 1906, Dr. Saxton (Lee) is transporting some very precious cargo back to England from Tibet--the frozen mummy of a 2 million year old proto-human creature which may have ties to the yeti. He is irritated by the presence of an old colleague of his, Dr. Wells (Cushing), who is overly curious about the nature of his finding. Before boarding the Transiberian Express, he is additionally irritated by a priest, who tells him his cargo is of the Devil--a statement somewhat easy to believe, given the dead man with the turned-white pupils found mysteriously at the perimeter of the crate; similarly, the priest is unable to draw a cross on the crate with chalk. Saxton, being Christopher Lee, dismisses all of this as rubbish and poppycock and soon he, Wells, and the yeti are aboard the train. Wells eventually pays a porter (VICTOR ISRAEL!!!) to peer inside the crate, but little does he knows that doing so will awaken the yeti's demonic presence. It slowly transpires that the "yeti" was merely the host body for something ancient...and alien. Indeed, by gazing into the retinal images of the dead yeti (in invocation of optography, my favorite pseudoscience) they determine that whatever was wearing the yeti was an extraterrestrial presence left behind on Earth 2 million years prior. All that time, this creature has been waiting for a chance to escape--and it doesn't care who it has to possess or slaughter to leave Earth.

Though there are suggestions of the supernatural--or rather, the super-scientific, for one can assume the alien's powers of possession are merely an evolutionary quirk of its race rather than an employment of magic--from the get-go, I seriously went into this just expecting a yeti-on-a-train movie. That in itself would be pretty fascinating, especially with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Victor Israel, and (though I did not mention him in the synopsis) Telly Savalas in tow. Savalas plays a ruthless Russian cossack who boards the train to investigate the deaths, and mostly ends up manhandling the passengers until he learns too late about the alien. Without the alien, however, this movie probably wouldn't end up in A-List territory. For without the alien, we would not have the climax where Christopher Lee fights off an army of zombies, a feat which he probably never replicated.

I really cannot understate how much subverted expectations help this movie. Even in small ways. I bet you'd never see a movie made in Franco's Spain starring the leads of the infamously-conservative Hammer Horror franchises suggest that there are powers which God Himself can't save us from. The question of faith is a big one in this movie and it is never entirely answered--merely explored. I feel it sort of works better that way, raising chicken-or-egg questions on the nature of mythology. Does the alien resemble a demon because it actually comes from Hell, or is it that ancient humans were inspired to create tales of demonic beings because of encounters with the creature? I've always enjoyed stories like this, and that it tells such a story with a light touch is definitely a high point.

The alien also invokes another expected trope when it tries to convince its human enemies that if they let it live, it will use its superior knowledge to get rid of hunger and disease. It's a trick, of course, and we don't even know if that's something the alien can do. But even if it can't, it's a testament to the alien's psychology that it employs this trick. It has learned to be a demon--and demons tempt people. That's how they get you.

Again, the movie does manage to drag in places, but originality is a mighty queen. Horror Express constantly innovates and deconstructs its own ideas while never coming across as silly or ass-pull-y for such. Alien invasion movies set in the early 1900s are rare anyway, so it's totally worth it to check out this one.

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Book Club of Desolation #22: Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres (1971), by Paul Bera

Last year I took a look at the first of the French Frankenstein pulps. This year, I figured it would be nice to have the Book Club of Desolation return to similar waters--only this time, the book I read was untranslated. That's why I failed in my promise to have a monthly Book Club review up for January (on top of being sick as shit). It took me quite some time to read my way through Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres, the first of Paul Bera's six-volume series chronicling the eternal war between the avatars of cosmic forces known as Leonox and Lisa, but I found it a fulfilling experience, to say nothing of the wonders it did for restoring my knowledge of French. Even with the language barrier in place, Bera's prose reads smoothly and thrillingly, with enough pulp action and supernaturalism to make me seriously consider tracking down the rest of the series, before all the remaining rare copies are snatched up.

Our protagonist is Lacana, a ten-time serial killer constantly on the run from the police. While hiding out in Paris, he feels a compulsion to enter a building, which seemingly contains more on the inside than it does on the outside. This is the headquarters of the mysterious organization known as "Leonox and Co." headed by, as you may expect, a man named Leonox. But Leonox is less a man than he is a demon; he possesses supernatural powers, and is in fact the embittered slave of what may or may not be the cosmic embodiment of evil, known as "the Master" or "He Who Controls Leonox." In exchange for his service, Leonox offers Lacana a new identity, including a new face and set of fingerprints--he'll accomplish this by giving him a whole new body. The first of many catches in this deal is that in order to get this body, he has to share a coffin with it. The process is a success, however, and Lacana becomes instead Francis Dalvant, a famous journalist killed in Vietnam. As part of his operations, "Dalvant" next comes in contact with the mysterious Lisa, a young woman who claims to be able to see Lacana's soul in Dalvant's body. Lisa has frequent clashes with the police for her strange statements and behavior; they think she's a drug addict. Slowly, however, Lacana/Dalvant will learn that she is Leonox's spiritual opposite, a servant of a more benevolent cosmic force known as "He Who Controls Lisa." (It's worth noting that neither of these cosmic forces are truly good or evil, it's just that Lisa is beautiful and Leonox is monstrous, both in a variety of ways.) His encounters with Lisa "reunite" him with Dalvant's old friend, the Principal of Police Princex. In the end, Lisa and Princex reform Lacana, who ultimately takes on the mental traits of Dalvant, who was an intrinsically good man. He and Lisa go after Leonox and successfully kill him after he takes control of the body of Dr. Satelm, who has the power to unleash a world-destroying plague. Lisa takes the rap for the murder, claiming she was Satelm's jealous mistress, and goes to jail--but to Lacana/Dalvant's delight, she escapes, and he begins traveling the world in search of her.

It's amazing how well Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres fits the formula of English pulp stories, and how well it pulls it off too. It's something of a random events plot, yes--now Lacana is poisoned with curare! Now Leonox is trying to unleash a plague!--but it also taps into the vein of worldbuilding which is so vital to pulp storytelling. So many ideas whiz past us at once. Just pages after revealing that our narrator-protagonist is a serial murderer, we are dragged into a world of the magical and inexplicable with the cosmic distortions of Leonox's headquarters. From there we have body-swapping, celestial war, and living burials. Oftentimes, the descriptions of the spiritual aspects of Leonox and Lisa come across as Lovecraft-lite, or Lovecraft processed through fairy-tales--sparkling and glittering, but also vast, unknowable, and perhaps most properly, incomprehensible. All of this is presented in a style which is both simple and compelling.

I really should say how grateful I am for the simplicity of the style. A lot of key points are repeated again and again, which helped me get through the plot in the case of my translations failing the first time around. (I'm still embarrassingly vulnerable to false cognates.) However, this style is also probably the book's greatest weakness--as compelling as it is, the tendency to repeat does get a little silly at times. "It was incredible that I, Lacana, ten-time killer, could be standing here in the presence of the police!" is a phrase that comes up over time and time again. Yeah, I imagine most serial killers would be shocked at rubbing elbows with the cops after making their faces known, but we don't need to be told that so often. Lacana also has a tendency to forget that he is now Francis Dalvant for too much of the book, and he keeps chanting that he has new fingerprints over and over again. These parts can be glazed over once you get the rhythm of things, though.

I keep thinking about how cool it is to have the main character of the book be a serial killer who slowly redeems himself as pieces of another man merge with his persona. I'm pretty sure that Dalvant's spirit is actually coming back and that's what's causing Lacana to take on his traits--eventually their reference to themselves as two people seems to transcend metaphor. Lacana/Dalvant is thus of dual nature, good and evil--though Dalvant wasn't purely good, nor was Lacana purely evil. Setting up this dichotomy furthers the book's themes of good and evil by making our lead(s?) into parallel(s?) of Leonox and Lisa, albeit with human drives that the reader can understand. Bera seems to believe that Good and Evil are important concepts to mankind, but they also have gray areas and spots where they blend--how very '70s of him! It's notable too that Christianity doesn't enter the picture at all; neither of the forces behind Leonox and Lisa are aligned with God or Satan in any way.

I say this is a book that reflects the '70s, but it's also French in a way that reminds me of why I love French media. It makes sense to title the series after Leonox, and to have the protagonist be a reforming serial killer, when this is a story coming from the same country that created not only the Grand Guignol, but Fantomas, the ultimate villain-pulp protagonist and grandpappy to Diabolik, Killing, Kriminal, and all those other groovy, creepy masked thieves and killers who spread through Europe and the Middle East throughout the middle of the 20th Century. France loves its villains, and Leonox was no exception...even if he's largely forgotten today.

The chronicles of Lisa and Leonox are practically begging for English translations, and I would eagerly snap those up if/when they ever came along. Despite some minor flaws, this was an awesome read and I would love to see what happened next to these characters. Longue vie à Leonox!

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The Nightmare Never Ends (1980), by Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, and Greg Tallas

Ah, yes. With this, we move one step closer to getting to review Night Train to Terror, the greatest anthology film of all time and "sequel" to Gretta. You know how much I love Gretta and this one is a worthy prequel to this little fucked-up series that Night Train of Terror forces them all into.

James and Claire Hansen have only a small shortage of troubles in their life. James has fallen under criticism for the publication of his anti-religion book, God is Dead, and Claire has begun having strange nightmares of "devils and demons." When she goes to see a stage psychic in Vegas, he unlocks visions of Nazi Germany. Around this time, police lieutenant Sterne (Cameron Mitchell) begins having trouble with an elderly Holocaust survivor named Abraham Weiss, who is insistent that a 20-something rich socialite named Olivier is one of the Nazis who killed his family during the War, despite the fact that he's decades too young. Soon Claire and Sterne meet in the middle and begin to find out that they are wrestling with Satan himself. And Satan has his eyes on James Hansen, whom he believes is the perfect vessel for killing God once and for all.

I wrote that introduction based entirely off my memories for this movie, hopeful that it would live up to my expectations. Sure enough, the mental note I tagged to this film--"As weird as if not weirder than Gretta"--turned out to be accurate. The two films are similar but I don't yet know if there was ever any connection between them. Both of them have the same brand of horrible editing and odd cardboard acting that only '80s can provide. Claire in particular is horrible and as such she makes a very strange choice for a protagonist. But then, I've followed movies that featured Chesty Morgan as a protagonist and they turned out okay. The woman playing Claire isn't nearly as bad an actress as Chesty Morgan, but she comes close at times.

The Nazi angle is really jarring in this. To put things in perspective, we have no hints of Nazism until the psychic tells Claire to flash back to her dreams. Then suddenly: "SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL!" and we're in the middle of SS Girls all of a sudden! Okay, I should specify that we aren't literally transported to the footage of SS Girls, but it's a party straight out of that film, sans the loads of nudity. The movie manages to handle the Nazi material well, clearly borrowing from Boys from Brazil and Marathon Man in places as far as the Nazi-hunting goes, but once we learn demons are involved, the Nazis are reduced to just being a cog in the wheel. The paranormal elements are also jarring but not quite as much--but still, you wouldn't expect a movie about Nazis and psychic dreams to suddenly feature a fucking xenomorph, would you?

I think this movie may be an anti-atheist film but I'm not sure. We're probably meant to be on Claire the Catholic's side as she spars with her husband over his rejection of religion. However, James' atheism is so ridiculous that it almost seems to be a parody. No serious atheist would use the disproof of Jesus as a historical figure as their sole evidence that all world religions are objectively bullshit--especially when said "disproof" is shockingly lazy! However, his atheism is still used for an intriguing purpose. After all, Olivier and his demons recruit James on the premise that his atheism is a pretense for Satanism. But James doesn't believe in the devil any more than he believes in God, leading to a scene where Olivier becomes something of an Inquisitor in the Christian sense, ordering James to repent his disbelief in Satan! In the end his refusal doesn't save him, however.

It's strange, too, because in this universe belief in God won't save you either. I was left with the impression at the end that this is a godless universe, or has become one, meaning the bad guys win. That's '80s horror for yuh.

The Nightmare Never Ends labors under the prospect that it really means something, or at least it gives the impression of such labor. For that reason, I think it's worthy of multiple viewings, and I know I'll return to it again and again over my life, if nothing else because the rubber monsters in it are amazing. And now that this is taken care of, we can move on to the series finale, with Night Train to Terror. This movie is already pretty weird, but imagine it now with most of its insides cut 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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Image Source: Wikipedia

Shark Exorcist (2015), by Donald Farmer

Here we are at last. Spookyween comes to the present day.

To those of you who came for the horror recs, this must seem like a disappointing end to Spookyween, as there's no way this movie can be good. To those of you who came here because you're a trash hipster like me, this must seem like a disappointing end as well, because I blew my chance to talk about the Donald Farmer movie that MATTERS. Yes, it's true, we didn't do Demon Queen this year. And no, I haven't seen Vampire Cop, if that's the Donald Farmer film you think is the Big One. Fact is, I needed a movie for the 2010s and The Amazing Bulk sure as shit isn't a horror movie--well, not conventionally, anyway. I've generally tried on this site to steer away from the maxim that trash is dead in the 21st Century, if anything because many of the great trash creators of yesterday are still alive and kickin'. Shark Exorcist is definitely indicative of the decline of the "bad movie" as time condemns that "genre" to mind-melting self-awareness, but the movie overcomes the crass cash-grabbiness of its title with sheer oddity. Farmer probably unknowingly shows us that if trash is to survive, it won't be in a form akin to the movies he was making in the '80s and '90s. It's probably the Neil Breen/Tommy Wiseau school of what-the-fuckery that will be remembered by people like me in the future, which Farmer comes hauntingly close to emulating.

A nun named Sister Blair is actually a Satanist, and she is presently wanted for torturing thirteen children to death in the name of the Devil. While the nun's on the run, she is confronted by a woman who knows of her crimes--she stabs this interloper and offers her body to the ocean, praying to Satan for an avenger. Said avenger takes on the form of a predictably awful-looking CGI shark. A red shark with glowing yellow eyes, no less! The shark first attacks Emily, Lauren, and Ali, a trio of friends who have decided to vacation by the lake. Ali is badly injured, but strangely, it's Lauren who seems most profoundly affected by the encounter with the creature. She becomes withdrawn and apathetic, almost seeming to take pleasure in the fact that her friend was hurt; eventually, she begins expressing an obsession with fish and water. Emily, with the aid of a priest named Father Michael, must slowly uncover the secret of the spirit that now lives inside Lauren. While this is happening we also follows the crew of a TV show called Ghost Whackers (?) as they invoke the spirit of the shark, causing the main hostess to be possessed multiple times (??). It all ends, of course, with a Shark Exorcism from a Shark Exorcist, and a(n un)predictable twist ending.

The reason why most people would be inclined to write Shark Exorcist off as irredeemable comes from the shaky boom in sharksploitation (ugh) movies these last few years. You know them, but I'll name them anyway: Sharknado, Ghost Shark, Two-Headed Shark Attack, Sharktopus, and probably many others which went straight to video on labels so small not even the Intentional Bad Movie fans could find them. I'll hear about them now and again in bits and pieces for the rest of my life, turning to them desperately at last after I've scratched my way all through the darkest deeps of women-in-prison flicks, Mondo movies, Z-list teen sex comedies, and all the other stuff I'll have to look to when I run out of the material I normally like. Anyway, Shark Exorcist is not that bad, largely because it's not done bad on purpose. There's only one moment of intentional comedy I can think of, and it actually works because it's so unexpected: Emily says, "It's like she's..." And we assume of course she's going to say "possessed," because this movie is unusually earnest when it comes to lines like that. But instead, the line comes out: "...really fucked up." Duh-dun-TSS.

What is bad is that the film is overly repetitive. Really, the same few scenes are repeated a couple of times--and the movie doesn't even reach its full 70 minutes before the end. There are several minutes of end credits, and then a frankly fascinating post-credits scene which I'll get to in a bit, which lasts for about ten minutes. This is a short film projected artificially to barely-feature length. But, oh, ho, ho, does it make up for it. Donald Farmer has lost none of the weirdness that makes movies like Demon Queen stand out decades later.

There are the possession scenes. Nothing spells fun like an adult flailing on the ground, shouting out garbage like, "I...will...eat...your...flesh...and...swallow...your...souls!" in the same voice middle schoolers do when trying to imitate their favorite death metal songs. Speaking of middle schoolers, we get a scene where Lauren, whilst in the throes of demon-shark possession, goes to a playground and comes across a character who is seemingly a child--except, she is played by an adult actress, so I assume she is supposed to be mentally handicapped. In a tonal whiplash which the film will repeat only once, Lauren takes this girl to a pool, where it is heavily implied she is going to molest her. It's just uncomfortable, but it's the first of a few nuggets of discomfort which help me feel that this movie is actually a little scary.

The next nugget is particularly visceral because it kinds of makes me wonder if I should be so quick to praise Director Farmer. This is kind of an infamous scene for those who have watched or heard of this, from what I can tell, but we get a prolonged sequence of a girl taking a nap in the sun while a fat man parades around her, taking increasingly creepy pictures of her semi-nude body. And then, he just leaves--not having directly harmed her, but with no explanation either! This movie is pretty sleazy when it comes to the female body, but it dives in headfirst in what we could guess is perhaps a bit of self-awareness. Maybe Farmer wants us to feel uncomfortable. Maybe he wants us to feel guilty for the voyeurism, deliberate or otherwise, that embody when we watch movies like this. But barring a statement from Farmer himself it's impossible for me to say.

And there is the post-credits sequence. Call me a blasphemer if you wish, but I will say the following with all sincerity: this scene is scarier than anything in The actual Exorcist. There, I said it. I have no apologies. The Exorcist took up two hours of my time and I still rolled my eyes and said, "The book was a lot better" (which is no insult to the book). Anyway: we end with a girl, who seems to be a high schooler, going into an aquarium which appears to be in the local mall. She expresses an uncomfortable amount of affection for the stuffed sharks they have there, and also rubs herself up against the tank like Lauren did when she was possessed. But then, while staring into the tank, she starts to break down crying. No one notices. She steps outside and leans against a wall, panting heavily as if shrugging off a severe near-death experience. During this entire sequence, there is no sound except for ambient music.

What.

No, seriously, what the fuck was that?! That's--that's weird! Can you imagine just seeing that in real life and having no context? Why was she even doing it in context? Was she sad the fish were trapped in a tank? Was she sad because she couldn't join them in the tank? Did she see something in the water that we couldn't? I don't care if this is sequel bait (no pun intended)--this is some weird shit, and I still get goosebumps watching this scene on my third viewing.

Of course, it's ruined a little by its very tail end, where the actress spins around suddenly to jumpscare us with fake vomit. So there's that.

It's very easy to condemn Shark Exorcist, for reasons pertaining to almost every detail of its existence. Perhaps in some senses it should be condemned. But it's weirdly captivating to me, and I hope I've compellingly shared enough of its weirdness with you. I encourage you as ever to seek it out, and have some fun with it this Spookyween.

Well, this is it--this is the last movie review of 2017. But the year's not over yet--we still have Bookvember to get to! Plus, this year I'll post my Top Ten New Views for 2017. Thank you all for a wonderful year. Now get excited for BOOOOKS!

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Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), by George Barry

Hey, I reviewed Troll 2 and Manos. It can't hurt to take a look at Death Bed too.

A couple is hiking through the woods to get to an old abandoned house. There's a bed in there that they want to fuck on. Well, that the dude wants to fuck on--this is an awkward sort of relationship. Judging from douchedude's letterman jacket they might be meant to be high school students. There's a man who's been trapped behind a painting in the bedroom for sixty years, who is unable to speak to the other characters but narrates the film. He watches as the bed first eats their food--extruding a foamy yellow stomach acid to do so--and then the lovers themselves. The rest of the film follows the misadventures of the various people who stumble across and are eaten by the Death Bed. Slowly, the narrator reveals the Bed's story: long ago, a demon fell in love with a human woman and created a bed to seduce her in. However, because he was a demon she died during their encounter, and in his grief for her he cried tears of blood, which animated the bed with a ceaseless hunger. Eventually, the narrator is able to speak to a girl who is the reincarnation of the bed's "mother," and with some good ol' ceremonial magic the bed is put to rest.

If a movie with the title Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was made today, you can bet it would be some sort of zany Troma-esque comedy. And while Death Bed is certainly a comedy, it's not really "zany." Or disgusting. Or stupid. That being said, it's not particularly smart, either. It just has style. I've tagged it as "artsy" but in terms of theme and universal questions and whatnot, it's not particularly strong. But it adopts a strange dignity unto itself. Close-up shots show blood droplets snuffing out candle-flames. Statues cry sanguinary tears. Old-timey sepia stock footage plays. And, there is a lady who sleeps in the bed reading a magazine called Oral Lesbians.

Yeah, this movie is pretty goofy. One of the prolonged flashbacks in the history of the Death Bed--surely the most essential of all of them--tells the tale of "Dr." Graham and his wife, who turned the mansion of the Death Bed's residence into a sexual healing clinic; i.e. an orgy club. The narrator speaks of the Death Bed's "one true feast" of six orgy practitioners, including the good doctor and his wife, one sunlit afternoon. I seem to remember this subplot taking up around ten minutes of the movie. It feels like that in any case. They could've done a whole movie with just that in my mind, but I need to be careful what I wish for.

Probably my favorite detail about this movie's weird sideways humor is the fact that the narrator, based on his appearance, on the style of his art, and on the fact that he died of tuberculosis before being trapped behind his painting, is 19th Century artist Aubrey Beardsley. I can think of no reason as to why they would choose Beardsley of all people to fulfill this role aside from that George Barry was a fan of his (and not without reason). The fact that they don't even say his name in the credits makes this a fun inside joke to catch. They even get to joke around with some of his famous quotes, paraphrasing them somewhat: "You have one aim--the grotesque. You are nothing if not grotesque. Except hungry." It's something for snobs and gorehounds alike.

And indeed, this is a pretty gory movie--a lighter H.G. Lewis, I would say. This gore is accompanied wonderfully by a plethora of bad acting. The two go so well together. I would say this is a Kids Goofing Off sort of deal but the people involved are in their 40s, so it's Director's Friends Goofing Off instead. Performances range from sincere to intoxicated. Try to strain out some of the dialogue and guffaw endlessly at the inanity of some of the deliveries. To say nothing of the material itself.

If there was any sort of theme to the movie, it would be one of awkwardness. The couple at the beginning is awkward. The group who shows up at the house at the beginning are all awkward coworkers. A man has his hands eaten down to the bones by the bed, and his response is one of feeling awkward. The demon who was the bed's "father" fucked the love of his life to death Edward Cullen-style, which is awkward. I don't know what the director was trying to say with this, if anything. Perhaps just that life is awkward, even when you are being digested by demonically-possessed furniture. Truer words, never spoken.

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The Bye Bye Man (2017), by Stacy Title

This was a treasure.

Unlike The Book of Henry, I missed this one in theaters, and subsequently caught up to it on a rental. And oh my God, it is really fucking bad. There are several reasons why it is bad and there are several reasons why I chose to review it for the site, which I will greatly enjoy delving into because it means I get to rip this movie a new asshole. I will say initially that I liked this for the same reason why I liked Book of Henry: what the hell are our kids gonna think about us for having taken this crap?

We open in 1969, with a man named Larry running around his neighborhood killing his friends and family, all the while chanting, "Don't think it, don't say it." He wants to know who's told who about "the name," warning that "he's coming." We then cut to a shot a train, and go on to the present day. Three college students, Elliot, Sasha, and John. Elliot and Sasha are dating, but there's an unspoken, Phantom of the Convent-esque attraction between Sasha and John. After getting some strange vibes in the house Elliot finds a drawer left behind by the old owner, which has Larry's motto inscribed on it, accompanied by the words "The Bye Bye Man." Later, Sasha invites over her friend Kim, who is a medium. They hold a seance wherein Elliot reveals he's an Amazing Atheist fanboy, but Kim nonetheless leads the group in a good ol' Hollywood Seance Seizure.

Sasha begins to develop a bad cough, and all three of them begin to hallucinate. These hallucinations all tend to put them in embarrassing or harmful circumstances. They also begin to become aware of the Bye Bye Man, and how he becomes more real to them the more they think about him, and the more scared of him they get. Elliot's research, facilitated by the world's best librarian, brings him to a redacted newspaper article written by Larry, who we learn killed himself with what looks to be the world's tastiest swig of Drain-O after slaughtering the last of the folk contaminated by the Bye Bye Man's influence. He tries to destroy the article, but the Bye Bye Man strikes quickly and makes Kim step out in front of a train; then, he basically makes Elliot seem like a crazy person, leading to him getting arrested. In a hilarious scene, Elliot talks his way out of prison with the most bullshit logic ever, even though his detainer is a hardass high-rank cop played by Carrie-Anne Moss. I cannot describe the conversation they have--it must be seen to be believed. Anyway, in the end, the Bye Bye Man comes for the trio with his N64-graphics CGI dog, and murder and mayhem ensues. Elliot seemingly seals away the evil...or does he?

So this wasn't as bad as the reviews led me to believe. However, it was still an unforgettable experience in vast and dramatic incompetence. I think the best place to start is the first thing I noticed about this film, which is what this film rips off. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the people who made this saw Marble Hornets, the first big Slenderman YouTube show, because the two stories share a lot of commonalities. Both are about young people who come in contact with a curse of sorts wherein an inhuman monstrosity begins terrorizing them after they learn about it and how it gains strength by people learning about and becoming afraid of it. Those who are particularly sensitive to the presence of the entity begin violently coughing, and the entity sends its victims into fugue states where they experience lost time, mood swings, and hallucinations. I do firmly believe that they were trying to cash in on Slenderman here due to the big faceless guy's recent transition to the sellout world of Hot Topic merch, despite the fact that stories of demons conjured up by sheer belief go back for millennia, and they scare the fuck out of me. In case you cannot tell, this movie did not scare me in the least.

This was put out by Universal, by the way. Hey, the Bye Bye Man should be part of the Dark Universe!

Actually, this movie has an uncanny number of production companies. Six or seven by my count. Interesting.

Anyway; this movie also rips off The Babadook, again, by being about a demon which is summoned up by people coming in contact with a record of it. The Bye Bye Man is similarly akin to the Babadook in that he cannot be gotten rid of once he begins haunting people. (For those of you who followed that Gay Babadook meme, I present to you thus the concept of the Bi Bi Man.) His implacability also echoes the entity from It Follows. All of these recent, more successful ideas have been Frankenstein'd together to make something that is nearly hilarious in its plagiarism. You feel the age in the movie, even though it only came out less than a year ago. I know I said that tulpa and other such creatures are among my worst fears, and that's true, but movies like this are helping me break through the fear. I mean, come on. R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour had an episode on fear-conjured demons that was more involving than this, and that came out nearly seven years before this did.

Now, onto the good stuff. At the start of this film, we have some of the same douchey movie college dudebro stuff that makes me come out of the woodworks for the Ouija Experiment movies. It is very much like a semi-white version of Ax 'Em. There is wallpaper of a fish graphically sucking a man's cock. Then, at the housewarming party for the trio, people play baseball with a Nerf football, like it's the tuxedo football game in The Room, or the "one-on-one" scene in Catwoman. There's also weird symbolism involving trains (?) which involves trains running over the three while they stand on the tracks showing us their nude asses. Okay. I think it's supposed to be that the Bye Bye Man is coming for them like a train about to crush them, but it's still pretty stupid. What's not stupid is how a dog which is part of the wallpaper turns into CGI so it can turn to the audience and snarl. Its head even transforms into a skull. This is meant to foreshadow the Awful CGI Dog, which...oh dear God.

This thing is fucking awful. It looks like something out of Where the Dead Go to Die, and if there is any way that that can be a good thing, I don't mean it as a good thing. It's a glossy, overly-smooth mess straight out of one of the Godzilla PS1 games. What makes it even worse is that it's never explained what it is, why it's working with the Bye Bye Man, or hell, what the Bye Bye Man himself fucking is. I'm sure this, too, is part of the Slenderman plagiarism, and they're trying to be all, "It's unexplained which makes it creepier!" But not in something like this. I laughed every time that dog was onscreen for all the dumb issues it brought to the movie's forefront.

(It has also occurred to me that perhaps the Bye Bye Dog is a ripoff of Smiledog, another demon that haunts those who know about it from Internet meme culture. God, I knew there was a reason I dreaded the day Hollywood started stealing from creepypastas.)

Anyway, I have run out of things to say about The Bye Bye Man, at least until the direct-to-video sequel rears its head. Here's the usual point where I recommend the movie, and sing its praises, but here, I'm going to confess that you have to be a straight-up fucking maniac to squeeze any sort of enjoyment out of this. I loved the hell out of it, but again, only because I love watching utter disasters, and because it was better than I anticipated. See it at your own peril--and I mean that gravely.

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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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The Phantom of the Convent (1934), by Fernando de Fuentes

I'm going to tell you all something depressing: I have almost exhausted my supply of horror movies from the '30s and '40s. It's not depressing because I'm going to be running out of these kinds of movies, it's depressing because I've watched so many of them. The ones that have appeared recently on the site are only the tip of the iceberg...remember, I tend to review stuff on this site that I like. Well, fortunately, I've not quite done mining out these decades, as it turns out I've been blinded by American-centrism, and forgotten that other countries made low-budget horror films in the '30s and '40s. I've tried to get into some of the British scare films from this time, particularly those featuring camp legend Tod Slaughter, but this is one time where British sensibilities are too overwhelmingly mild for me. I need something that has teeth in its mouth and meat on its bones. Well, as it happens, there was a short string of horror movies made in Mexico in the 1930s that erupted in seeming response to the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein. (After all, Spanish-speaking Mexicans would have had access to a Dracula all their own, due to Universal's shot-by-night alternate Spanish version of Dracula.) Recently I've worked through as many of these '30s Mexican fright films as I can get my hands on, which is tough given that, surprise, many of them have been lost. Unfortunately, for me at least, fewer still among them have ever been given English subtitles. I've been able to decipher some of them thanks to some of the English and French cognates I can pick up now and again, but otherwise I'm reliant on physical presentation and online plot synopses. One of the ones that has gotten an English translation, however, is 1934's The Phantom of the Convent. Even if this movie wasn't available with subs, it would still stand out among its brethren, but I am infinitely grateful for whoever subbed this film. Phantom of the Convent is a fascinating, eerie, legitimately good horror movie with some complicated psychology, which I'm perpetually stunned has not left grander scars on the face of cinema.

Alfonso, Eduardo, and Cristina are a trio traveling in the mountains somewhere. The wimpy Eduardo is married to Cristina and is uncomfortably aware of the attraction she shares with Alfonso, who is his best friend. This sort of tangled red string is not the sort of thing you want to have when you end up stranded on the mountain in the middle of the night, nor when a mysterious stranger and his spooky dog show up to offer you shelter at the monastery that's supposed to be abandoned. This is the very fate that befalls the three, and it turns out that that reports of the abandonment of the ominously-named Monastery of Silence are indeed exaggerated. However--as if the imposing black-clad stranger or the too-huge eyes peering through the door weren't enough tip-off--it becomes clear that something is amiss in the Silent Convent. The three find a cabinet that is partially tipped over; they fix it, but as they leave the room Eduardo glances back and sees it's been restored to its initial position. They also come across a monk who is flagellating himself, which we only see in shadow. Eeriest of all is the monk's cell which is blocked off with an enormous cross, which is either covered in scratches or what seem to be strips of flesh...that we can't tell makes it worse. Above the cell is an enigmatic Latin message about the damnation of those who succumb to carnal sin, and before our heroes are properly prepared, they begin hearing agonized moans from within...

It is here that the monks properly welcome the three with an enormous banquet, wherein they all but reveal they are the living dead. Strangely, the three don't seem to care, as they are all beginning to undergo certain changes...Eduardo is becoming more cowardly, while Alfonso and Cristina grow even bolder about their extramarital lust. Still, what questions they do have for the monks are met only with standoffishness, at least until a wind begins to blow through the Monastery. The monks then go on about having to stop "him" and embark on a complex prayer ritual. Now they are willing to explain what has happened to their monastery. Long ago, there was a brother among them named Fray Rodrigo. Rodrigo coveted his best friend's wife, and despite knowing the evils of such, he made a pact with Satan to kill his friend and make his wife fall in love with him. For this, he was haunted by guilt, and eventually the Dark One came for him. The monks tried to bury his body, but every time they did, it would return to its cell, to the place its owner had been killed in.

The monks then received a curse from God, that they must pray until Rodrigo's soul was cleansed, no matter how long it took. During this time "the Evil" would raid the monastery at night and make the weird psychological hell it is today. Despite all of this knowledge, however, it becomes clear that Alfonso cannot escape the archetypical mold left for him by the wife-loving Rodrigo. And that brings him to a desperate, terrifying encounter with the awful things that lurk in Rodrigo's locked-up cell...

Most of the '30s Mexican horror movies I watched before this lacked the sheer distinctiveness that this movie possessed. Much like their northern counterparts, many of them were made to make a buck, and that was all. Of the selection I watched, I only found interest in the sci-fi thriller The Dead Speak, about a "mad" scientist's quest to prove the reality of forensic optography, and The Macabre Trunk, which may be the first horror movie to feature a scientist who harvests "glands" to keep his female relative living/young--it precedes the extremely similar Bela Lugosi flick The Corpse Vanishes by six years. What I think helps The Phantom of the Convent stand out is its uniquely Mexican identity--more properly defined as a Hispanic Catholic identity. One German review I read (one of the few available online of the film) made the same comparison I did, that the sinister monks and the monastery that is their tomb are highly reminiscent of Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead series. And with that connection in mind, you begin to see a critique of Catholic strictness arise in Phantom that director Fuentes shares with Ossorio's zombie Templars. Fuentes gives us a universe where God curses a large group of his most devout followers for the trespass of one of them, forcing them to beg him for this fallen man's forgiveness long past the point where any of them would have wanted to die. What's more, God then allows his greatest adversary to add to their misery relatively unchecked, held back only by constant prayer. As for the sinner himself, who died guilty for what he did? He is denied eternal rest within the grave, constantly reanimated to return to his place of penance. And that's before the Devil starts latching onto your soul and bringing out your absolute worst attributes!

Regarding those attributes, there is some implicit and unfortunate misogyny in this movie--at least, I see it as such. The person who becomes most obviously affected by the monastery's corrupting influence is Cristina--and specifically, the monastery makes her more lustful. Alfonso lusts for her too, but he also has his own "No, Johnny's my best friend" moments of resistance. Making the film's sole female character a symbol of lust is bad enough; that she is more strongly affected also suggests she has less internal resistance to the supernatural forces. This was sort of a thorn to me, as was the movie's tendency to repeat conversation points unnecessarily. Otherwise, the whole film was tightly scripted, filled with mystery and some spectacularly horrific imagery.

The ending made me realize I'd heard a variant of this story before; and that story, in turn, claimed to be based on a common folk tale. That is one thing I've noticed about these Mexican horror films--even the less-interesting ones have a much more clear-cut tie to folklore than their counterparts from the States. The Dead Speak's story of "the dead man's eyes" is older than Frankenstein and many of its inherent ideas, while two of the more famous entries in this era of Mexican horror include adaptations of the La Llorona story. Such is also the case with Phantom of the Convent's delving into Catholic lore to build its world. American movies surely conformed to the same type of archetypes as the mythos the Mexican filmmakers were drawing from, but it also seems like American movies had several extra layers of bullshit. The Macabre Trunk, with its parallels to the pretty-darn-batshit Corpse Vanishes, is one of the crazier ones, as is, seemingly, The Mystery of the Ghastly Face, which I found incomprehensible due to a lack of subtitles and plot synopses. (It may be the Mexican Face of Marble, but don't quote me on that.) It seems that Mexican filmmakers particularly enjoyed tapping into their roots in the Spanish-speaking world, probably because that's what their audiences wanted, whereas our American films can't be linked to one culture in particular.

Catholic unease aside, Phantom of the Convent has enough raw atmosphere and psychosis to make it a worthy equal to any of the great horror films that modern audiences love. Actually, this may be one of my new favorite horror films of all time in a way that almost makes me feel guilty reviewing it on a site dedicated to garbage. But the A-List is also about celebrating the obscure, and Phantom is a film that is undeserving of the obscurity it has today. I say that often, but it takes a movie like this to remind me of when it really counts.

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Satan's Touch (1984), by John Goodell

One of the sets of arc words recurring throughout Satan's Touch is that "poker is a game of deception." Well, so is filmmaking. You take a bunch of images of real things and make them into things that are untrue. But Satan's Touch plays the deception game better than all others: the title alone, in addition to the box art and the first few minutes, will lead you to believe that this is a horror film. But oh, no. Satan's Touch is much more special than that. Satan's Touch is better than anything you could ever win in a Vegas casino. As the movie's recurring song keeps singing...take it from me, take it from me, we've hit the jackpot.

The film tells the story of Jim Parrish, a middle-aged grocery store owner from Crocus Hills, Iowa who is one day made the target of Satan himself. Satan looks like the Gem Fusion of Bob Ross and Kenny Loggins, and occasionally enters the film to answer his car phone and make quips like, "Earthquakes? Of course we do earthquakes. No, no...acts of God is just an expression." He decides to give Jim the horrible, horrible curse of winning every single gambling game he plays. He also sets Jim up with a set of raffle tickets for he and his wife to go to Las Vegas! Jim soon obtains a small fortune, but of course this does not go unnoticed by the casino's owner, who appears to be Stan Lee. He and his staff spend most of the movie trying to figure out Jim's system, which you'd think would make them want to kill him. Instead, the threat to Jim's life comes when it's exposed that one of Boss Lee's minions is trimming pennies out of the casino's computer, causing him to go rogue and try to kill the casino's cybersecurity lady--Jim essentially just gets in the way, and earns a tranq dart for his trouble. When Jim decides to end it all by folding four aces, Satan ditches his "victim" and Jim is able to prove that he can lose. This is enough for the casino to let him go, and Jim is freed from Satan's unexpected kindness forevermore.

Yes, this is a gambling thriller-cum-anti-gambling melodrama marketed as a horror film. As you might expect, everything is all the over the place. The movie starts out almost like an anachronistic '80s PureFlix movie, with Jim using a Christian argument to try to dissuade one of his customers, an old lady, from being a kleptomaniac. And both Jim and his wife believe that gambling is sinful. This is backed up by the fact that the gambling is facilitated by Satan himself. But again, Satan never brings Jim to any actual harm, and Jim's method of escaping his unbeknownst demonic pact is to stop playing, which would be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that he never displayed any signs of self-abuse through his gambling. All throughout the film he makes only small bets and remains entirely innocent and humble in his winnings. He doesn't even come close to corruption, and the violence in the film comes from circumstances entirely independent from him and Satan. Gambling is a positive force in this universe, even when it is powered by the devil.

Consider: the heads and employees of the casino are shown to be good people. While the boss is unfriendly towards Jim for taking a lot of his money, he never threatens to kill him--he just makes a blackmail tape, which is of questionable value anyway, since Jim's answers to propositions of extramarital affairs amount to roughly, "nah, but thanks anyway." When the conflict shifts to the shady bastard who skimming their dough, it is clear who the film favors. Sure, they cheat people, but they do so in a friendly way. There's an incredibly strange sequence at the start of the film, which just keeps going just when you think it's stopped. A severely inebriated man complains to a bouncer that he can't win at the slot machines. The bouncer offers to introduce him to a machine which "always pays out," which turns out to be the snack machine. After that, he offers to take him to a phone so he can call a cab, but this turns out to be a broken pay phone which eats even more of his money. Finally, another bouncer takes him to a change machine, where he's overjoyed to find a machine that at last pays out, even if it's just turning his bills into coins. It is one of the most bizarre sequences I've seen set to film, and it presents the staff of this casino as jolly jokers. Oh, those lovable scamps...stripping people of everything they're worth.

But on a more serious note, this movie seems at times to be a documentary on casinos, and that probably ties in with the protagonistic portrayal of powers that be at the casino. It's worth noting John Goodell's only other credit was on the 1974 cinema verite documentary Always a New Beginning, about the education of brain-damaged children, which was nominated for a fucking Oscar. So it's no wonder that there are a lot of shots of cards, chips, and bills being spread about, alongside lengthy Vegas-streets peoplewatching segments, and pseudo-interviews about the fine points of cybersecurity in the gambling business. It's pretty incredible.

There's always just a lot of weird shit that happens, even outside of the Satan stuff. This is a movie whose idea of realistic dialogue is, "I haven't enjoyed an all-night poker game like that in a long time!" Similarly, at the start of the movie, we have shots superimposed over larger shots of the exterior of Jim's grocery store, and a spinning roulette wheel. I will always appreciate pointlessly artsy composition like that. Finally, in the last scene, someone shuffles a deck using magic tricks, complete with Casio stings that sync up to his hand gestures. With these mixed in with everything else, Satan's Touch is an ineffably fun movie that only slightly drags, unworthy of the hate it's received in its scanty reviews over the years. Horror fans may want to take a rain check, however, unless you can keep your mind open.

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