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 She becomes withdrawn and apathetic, almost seeming to take pleasure in the fact that her friend was hurt; eventually, she begins expressing an obsession with fish and water.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!

Get the Bookvember magic early by subscribing to my Patreon! Plus, like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!

The Butcher (1990), by Maik Ude

It was uncannily difficult to find a '90s movie for Spookyween, as I've already exhausted almost every site-appropriate horror movie from the '90s that I like. I feel that says something about the '90s. At this stage in my life I'm generally disdainful of every decade of the 20th Century but strangely it is the decade of my birth that I have the least pity for. There's no such thing as a universal statement (save for perhaps "water is wet," "Nazis are bastards," etc.), but in the '90s, comics were bad, movies were bad, music was bad, TV had some decent things going for it but also Full House existed so it too was bad. I just don't like the '90s.

The first thing is that the '90s had a...weird sense of masculinity. Don't get me wrong--the older I get, the more I realize how truly weird mainstream expressions of masculinity have been in all stages of history. But when I think the '90s, I see covers for Rob Liefeld comics and Manowar albums. I see tons of big men with big guns on army recruitment posters. I see cartoon characters kicking the crap out of anthropomorphic cartoon drug dealers. And, I think of slasher movies that exist primarily to show what the inside of a human body looks like. Now, the thing is, gore movies have existed since the early '60s--Blood Feast and The Flesh Eaters are testaments to that. But by the '90s, there were even fewer censors than ever before, even if everyone was freaking out about Satanic child abuse in kindergartens for some reason. Things got daaark, man. And that is what brings us to The Butcher. Made by the young, The Butcher is an indulgence in the same ultra-masculine obsession with slasher movie violence that motivated Maik Ude's fellow German Andreas Schnaas. Yet, this is the sort of movie Schnaas thinks he's making--and unlike Schnaas's masturbatory exercises, The Butcher manages to give us people to root for amidst all the gut-spilling.

In a pre-credits sequence, we see a man has been kidnapped and brought to a dark basement. He is awoken by a stream of piss in his face. He has been captured by the Butcher, a greasy-looking asshole dressed in leather gloves and a genuinely unsettling pillow-case mask (think Bruce without his swimming goggles). The Butcher saws his head off and remove his guts. Later, two dudes decide to go on a fishing trip and stumble across the head of what we can presume to be the victim of the opening scene. When trying to escape they are taken in by an old woman who is revealed to--I think--be the mother of the Butcher. Thus begins many days of horror for the two men as they are subjected to the Butcher's madness.

In case you can't tell, there's virtually nothing to this plot-wise--and not just because I don't speak German and this movie lacks subtitles. Despite this, by giving us two protagonists with a hobby, and taking time to detail that hobby (even if it's dull), it gives us a reason to want to follow them and the plot that moves around them. Is--is this what I've been reduced to? Celebrating the fact that a movie's characters fish? Ah well. They have fun and for some reason I like seeing them have fun. Probably 'cause I've seen this before, and because it's called The Butcher. These characters are going to end up getting seriously mutilated, so let them have their fun while it lasts. I realize it's strange to single this movie out above all others for a remark like that, but maybe there is actual credence to the idea that a slasher movie becomes more compelling when the victims are likable...

The movie did dedicate more time to plot than I remember, but make no mistake: this movie's primary concern was grotesquery. Much like West of Zanzibar, there's a heavy focus on visuals that are just meant to squick us out. It's par for the course stuff, but you better believe my 16-year-old self would've loved to put decapitations and rotting corpses as gross as the ones these kids pulled off in the movies I was making way back when. Budget is optimized, even if it shows--and the script, from what I can understand of it, is pretty tight as well. They even give us a sad old grandmother for one of the protagonists to make us feel super bad about what happen to him. Even if he does look like German Adam Sandler.

Let's talk about the Butcher himself. A simple design can go a long way: I mentioned the freaky pillow case mask (which you can always see his glinting gross rat teeth through), and the leather gloves, but there's something about a bloodsoaked leather apron that freak me out. No gimmicks here, but you know for sure that if the Butcher catches you, you are fucked. Oh, and just to be safe, he's also a cannibal. I'll take brutal efficiency when it's as appealing as this.

Even through the grossness, though, and the surprising professionalism, there are some little trashy leaks which made me smile extra hard. The opening credits are weirdly similar to those from I Am Here...Now. People refuse to mourn or even scream when their friends are violently tortured and killed in front of them. And, due to the aforementioned subtitle-less German audio, my limited German interacts with the movie in amazing ways, like when I get to pick out lines like, "Oh, scheisse! Das ist ein kidnappinghaus!"

The Butcher is probably, along with West of Zanzibar, the Spookyween movie I recommend the least. It's particularly hard to find, and aside from some chilling effects and a touch of real talent, it's not too dissimilar from other slasher movies made by teens. Still, I enjoy it quite a bit whenever I throw it on, and it would make a great double feature with Plaga Zombie--which would have been our '90s Spookyween entry if someone hadn't jumped the gun...

Patreon is where you wanna go if you wanna get more reviews like this. Plus, there's always our page on Facebook should ye want updates.

A Night to Dismember (1983), by Doris Wishman

I have called Carlos Tobalina "The Man," but Doris Wishman puts even him to shame. She was a director like no other, a pioneer not merely for being a woman in the mid 20th Century who ended up with the sort of career usually only obtainable and usually only wanted by men, but for being also something of an underground artist. She threw flourish and flair into 42nd Street sleaze with a style suggesting even she herself was unsure of what she was accomplishing with such. This attention to color and romance and drama was always contrasted with a hilarious feeling of slack laziness and rushed cheapness. And of course, Wishman was always as viciously exploitative as her male counterparts, if not moreso. While Wishman usually made sexploitation flicks intended to show off big boobs (or sometimes, to mix things up a bit, absurdly big boobs), A Night to Dismember was her attempt to cash in on the slasher movie craze rising from the hot freshness of Friday the 13th and, from a little earlier, Halloween. The result was doubtlessly bizarre to begin with, but then something very unusual happened. Someone tried to destroy the movie's print, and nearly succeeded--and this did not deter Wishman. She slowly reconstructed the film from what remained, using dubs and "clever" editing to hide the holes. Or, so she claimed: there's really only one bit of solid evidence that I know of to substantiate this. But just remember, even if this didn't happen, every frame of this movie definitely feels like it did. Remember that well!

The Kent family has lived in the small town of Woodmire Lake for 70 years. However, one October night in 1986 (I'll get to that, don't worry), the Kents were all killed in some manner. (The movie says all its death happen in one night, and that's bullshit, but again, I'll get to it.) Phineas Kent and his two beautiful daughters were slaughtered, and Broderick Kent killed himself after slaying his wife for insurance money. That left Adam Kent, his wife, and their three children, Billy, Mary, and Vicky. Vicky for all intents and purposes is our protagonist--five years prior, she was sent to a mental hospital for killing two boys. However, she's since reformed and recover, and she spends the movie with everyone around her, including and especially her family, fully expecting her to crumble back into homicidal insanity. Billy and Mary in particular want to keep all their parents' affections for themselves (despite looking old enough to have at least one grad degree), and as such forge an increasingly ludicrous string of stunts to frame Vicky and/or drive her nuts, including dressing up like a waterbound zombie and later some kind of green-skinned old man. Of course, there are also some killings going on which make it look mighty probable Billy and Mary won't need to frame their sister for murder. Detective Tim O'Malley is on the case, but will he figure things out before it's too late?

Most if not all of the plot of this movie is told via voiceover. This is because all the stuff that would normally forward the plot was destroyed in a fire...again, ostensibly. The possibility remains that all of the madness that dances across A Night to Dismember's 68 minutes was made on purpose, but even Wishman was too embarrassed to move forward without proper apologia in place. Listening to this voiceover shows a shakiness that has rarely been paralleled in other movies I've seen. Even if there wasn't a warbling delivery to it I'd still be agog at editing that leaves us with the line, "The Kents lived in Woodmire Lake for 70 years. Then, all of the Kents were dead." "Manic" is the word I wrote down to describe it, and I can't think of anything better. There are so many cuts in this film there's a special Death named after them. The tone, speed, and diction of a character's line will change at random, and there's beloved celebration of the old Coleman Francis trick of keeping everyone's mouth out of frame. Once we reach the axe murders all hell breaks loose, and the swiftness and repetition of the cuts nears artfulness. The "bong" sound that sometimes announces the appearance of Chesty Morgan's tits in Deadly Weapons makes a shocking reappearance, to the point of insanity. And there are "chase" scenes made of the same two or three shots looped endlessly.

As I said in my review for Frozen Scream, I'm positive that Thomas McGowan, who plays Kevin McGuire in that film, also plays Tim O'Malley, who is mysteriously uncredited both on IMDB and in A Night to Dismember's end credits themselves. O'Malley supplies the bizarre opening voiceover which summarizes the deaths of both Phineas and Broderick Kent's families in four minutes, as though this film was a sequel to movies about those murders. Then, he dates Vicky's killing of the neighborhood boys to "August of 1981," but also "five years ago." Remember this movie was released in 1983. Either the actor flubbed his line, the editing made him flub his line, or Wishman meant for this movie to be set in the future. Similarly, it's worth commenting on the fact that O'Malley insists the events of this all take place in one day, which I assume is meant to explain why Adam Kent never learns about the massacre of his family. But I'm sure we go through at least one day/night cycle. All of this just contributes to the sheer strangeness that this movie is ridden with.

Now, regarding the chance that there was another version of this movie: I believe it, and I think the trailer proves it. The trailer is a trip in itself, and it fortunately features a spooky narrator who tells us the story of the movie he's advertising. Except in this version, Mary Kent has no siblings, and is apparently assaulted in some form by a disfigured stranger--this encounter leaves her with psychic powers (!), which she uses to slaughter her family. Then, years later, Vicky Manuel moves into the former Kent home, where she begins having psychic visions of the murders. If you've been reading this review in any capacity you can tell that that is a totally different movie. Add in the fact that this trailer features a ton of footage completely unseen in the finished cut and I think the tales are true. This would explain one shot I've noticed in the final movie where one of Vicky's relatives is running towards a car saying, through dub, "Hurry up, dear, it's going to rain!" The shot is slowed down to make it seem less frantic but it's clearly a shot of people running in panic; the person speaking is looking over her shoulder and screaming. They just dubbed right over and hoped no one would notice. I would love to see the original version of this film (I do have to wonder why Wishman didn't make use of the "lost" footage present in the absolutely-extant trailer), but I'm also infinitely pleased with what we ended up with.

A Night to Dismember is one of my favorite movies of all time and I will say no more of it, due to my deathless hopes that more people will see and find fondness for it. I don't want to compare films to Troll 2, The Room, or, God forbid, Birdemic, but if you need a new great bad movie, this is it. It is nothing short of a miracle in filmmaking, which we can all learn from. Here's to Doris.

The Spookyween madness has one more week left! You'll get early access to it if you subscribe to my Patreon! And don't forget to like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!

Don't Look in the Basement (1973), by S.F. Brownrigg

There are a lot of words that go well with Halloween. Isolation. Desolation. Secrecy. It's a holiday which I feel is a lot about mood; it's one of the most primally emotional days of the year. As the barriers between worlds shrink and thin, they expose us to sensations from beyond. Chills up our spine. The rush of leaves in a midnight wind. Perhaps even the chattering of skeletons. Don't Look in the Basement is a movie which also all about mood. I found myself slightly bored while rewatching it for our Spookyween celebrations, but I realized that was because little was happening in terms of plot--in terms of feeling, however, great advancements were happening, and that was what kept me watching. A truly captivating film, Don't Look in the Basement manages to bring me new surprises with every new watching, and I'm sure it'll become an October staple for me.

At a rural mental hospital run by Dr. Stevens, a nurse named Jane is planning to leave. She's become too perturbed by the behavior of the patients to continue treating them, especially after one of them, Harriet, assaults her. However, as she's leaving, one of the patients, a former judge named Oliver Cameron, kills Dr. Stevens by apparent accident. Before Jane can leave, an unseen person steals the baby doll which Harriet believes to be her living child and places it in Jane's room; this leads to Harriet killing the nurse. Fortunately--perhaps--a replacement arrives in the form of Charlotte Beale, former head of the mental health ward at a big-name hospital. She was invited by Dr. Stevens to come out and assist him. In the face of his death, his replacement, Dr. Geraldine Masters, is hesitant to take Charlotte on, but eventually relents. Slowly, the delicate structure of the hospital begins to cave in itself, facilitated by that unseen weirdo, who's now running around snipping phone wires. Plus, more people are turning up dead. Charlotte begins to feel more and more like a patient herself, until at last she learns the truth. The woman she's been working for isn't a doctor. Masters is a patient, and her illness is that she has to believe she's a doctor. Now that word is getting out that this is all just one woman's fantasy, Masters suddenly realizes she has a lobotomy to schedule...

I know that this movie resembles many I've seen before. There's just something about '70s horror movies that just feels '70s, whether it's the style, the dialogue, the film quality, hell, even the shapes of people's faces sometimes. I kept thinking of Criminally Insane while watching this, and the reason is obvious enough from that later film's title alone. Don't Look is considerably more professional than Criminally Insane, seeming, at points, to be (gasp) a real movie. In fact, overall, the acting is really good, as is the cinematography, though the lighting fails at points. It is undeniable that the film is actually creepy. There's enough of a mystery about everything to keep it all going, and even if the patients aren't scary the house they live in certainly is. I always love rural horror movies because I am a spoiled suburbanite and I do sincerely believe that if you go far enough from the cities you can find some dark secrets. (But I also acknowledge the dark secrets my suburban home holds as well.)

I tried thinking about how ableism applies to this movie, and if I'm being honest, I wasn't offended by any of it as a mentally ill person. This is the sort of fantasy mental illness which is just sort of silly if you're in the mood for goofy Corpse Vanishes-style shenanigans. That having been said, this movie is surprisingly sympathetic to the mentally ill. The hospital isn't cruel towards its patients, though admittedly it seems from what we see of him that Dr. Stevens wasn't quite the most stable person himself. The patients are treated as human and accepted for who they are, and they aren't punished for a lack of progress. And characters talk about the patients sympathetically. Now, it may be an intended subversion of this kindness that much of it comes from someone who turns out to be a mental patient herself, and a murderer, at that. But it's hard to say. Dr. Masters was a doctor once, and she's been trying to rebuild herself here steadily. She shows expertise in her field and there seems to be hope for her. It's sort of empowering to view these statements, predating her final mental collapse, as a person with mental illness speaking for themselves. But then she turns out to be crazy and gets killed.

I could be more serious about this, but I want to move on by saying that there's a lot of cheese to balance out the seriousness and make it a genuinely fun ride. For example, when Allyson, the token nymphomaniac, is trying to seduce Judge Cameron, she says, "Do you like strawberries? I taste like strawberries!" And there's also a scene where a character announces that someone has had their tongue cut out, to help explain why the filmmakers couldn't afford an effect that conveyed this outside of filling the actress's mouth with fake blood. It reminded me of the movies I'd make with my friends when I was a kid, where someone's arm would be cut off, to the sound of a dubbed voice shouting, "Your arm is being cut off!!!"

Finally, a good cast is worth remembering. (Almost) all the patients are memorable in some sense: there's Sam, who has become child-like as a result of a violence-curbing lobotomy; the Sergeant, a war vet who can't get over losing his platoon; Harriet, who, again, thinks her plastic doll is her baby; Danny, who's illness appears to be severe Little Shit Syndrome (and whose name I initially misheard as "Denny"); Judge Cameron, who has a lot of other violent obsessions besides justice; Allyson, who has lost so many men in her life that she'll kill for love; and Mrs. Callingham, who just rants about nonsense. Those who don't have at least one likable trait are harmless, except maybe for Denny Danny. Seeing how each of these characters respond to one another will keep you locked on the screen even if nothing much is happening as far as plot momentum.

Brave the boredom, and great Spookyween fun shall be yours. I want to know what you think of it, so give it a shot!

If you want to see more Spookyween madness, check me out on Patreon! Plus, you can like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!

Valley of the Zombies (1946), by Philip Ford

Doctor X is relatively clunky, because horror in the early '30s was slow. As time went on, however, a more frantic pace could be found as B-movies needed to get their deal over with sooner, as writers took less time in writing, and as studios cut more and more money from these lesser programmers, ultimately reducing features like Valley of the Zombies to the sort of fodder which would play in the ultra-neutered market of TV movies. Fortunately, the existence (and hasty creation) of these B-features means I have lots of short, quick-paced material which is usually primed with the best sort of trashy hilarity. Valley of the Zombies is our shortest stop this Spookyween, at a whopping 55 minutes, but there's worlds to find in it that makes it worthy of looking over during this joyous month.

Terry Evans and Susan Drake are a doctor and nurse who are dating while working their way through their studies. Evans is mentored under Dr. Rufus Maynard, who informs the pair that a large amount of blood has recently gone missing from his supply under mysterious circumstances. After Evans and Drake leave, however, Maynard is visited by a man by the name of Ormand Murks, who appears to have time-traveled a year into the future to get fashion advice from Bela Lugosi in Scared to Death. There's a problem with Murks being here, though--he's supposed to be dead. A former undertaker, Murks was once placed in Maynard's mental hospital for his weird fixation with blood transfusions. As it happens, Murks needs blood because he has learned the secrets of the Valley of the Zombies--he has become the living dead. The vampiric blood-thief decides to take some fresh blood from Maynard himself. Terry and Susan return and stumble upon the crime scene, which implicates them in front of the police. Like you do, the pair decide to exonerate themselves by catching the crook themselves--admittedly, the police aren't much help, as they spend a few hours basically verbally torturing Susan in order to extract a confession, which was a process still pretty legal at the time. They have a clue: Dr. Maynard's body, alongside the body of Murks' other victim (in the form of his brother Fred, who was helping Murks steal the blood vials), has been embalmed. They finally head down to the old Murks Mansion to commence their investigation further, little aware that the last scion of House Murks is waiting for them.

Once more we have the premise not only of a particularly unusual killer abetted by super-scientific principles, but also a film where the primary heroes are also our comic relief. Perhaps taking some backwards inspiration from Nick and Nora Charles, our plucky investigators engage in quite a bit of banter, albeit banter far less sophisticated than the I-Am-Not-Shazam'd Thin Man and his wife ever exchanged. Unfortunately, a lot of this takes the rather sexist form of Susan being scared of everything. Admittedly, if I had spent most of my life training to be a nurse, I'd focus on steeling my nerves against mortal perils like disease and bloodshed, not vampire serial killers hiding in decrepit mansions, so I totally understand where she's coming from. Doesn't mean that Terry has to be a condescending prick as well (though I get the impression maybe we're supposed to find him a bit of an idiot).

What intrigues me the most about Valley of the Zombies is that it is essentially a cinematic form of a Villain Pulp. I'm sure there are plenty of movies out there similar to this (Ogroff possibly counts as one), but let me explain: back in ye olde days of pulp magazines, there were stories which centered around the villain as a protagonist of sorts. Pulp characters were always outlandish, the villains especially so, and with names like Dr. Satan and Dr. Death it was hard to go wrong. So Valley of the Zombies is a Villain Pulp starring Ormand Murks. And he is indeed a pretty neat villain--possibly cinema's only voodoo vampire, Murks is played by Ian Keith, one of the contenders to play Dracula in the Universal film. I think he probably would have done better than Lugosi, but then we'd never have everything Lugosi made after '31. While far from perfect, and hammy to the point where we can't quite take him seriously, Murks has some wonderful moments, including a creepy moment where he gives his best Evil Mastermind face while threaten-asking his brother, "You're going to put me in my grave?" He also embalms his victims for no fucking reason outside of the fact that it abets our protagonists, and because, well...that's what Super Villains do! I love it.

Everything about this movie is lensed in a strange comic melodrama that makes it all feel something akin to a dream. A dull dream at times, unfortunately, but that's a matter of age more than anything. Still, if you want to flash back to the days of nickolodeon B-features and get a whirlwind tour of the weird world of the undead, you can do no better. Valley of the Zombies is the perfect balance of spooky and campy for your cozy Spookyween night.

P.S. I hadn't mentioned its occurrence in the Doctor X review, but that's two for three on films featuring comic relief shenanigans involving pretending to be a morgue corpse. I guess people couldn't get enough of that one in the '40s. Come to think of it, I think I've seen the same gimmick in movies from the '80s as well. I guess some shit never dies...it only waits...to be re-born...

If you want to get horror reviews like these in advance, throw me a little coin on Patreon. And, you can like the A-List on Facebook for updates.

Doctor X (1932), by Michael Curtiz

It wouldn't be Spookyween without an Old Dark House. Now, calling Doctor X an Old Dark House film is a bit of a misnomer as the movie takes a little bit to actually get to the ODH in question. But this is the first Old Dark House movie I watched, and if it wasn't for it, then I think I would have developed a migraine over movies I love today like Sh! The Octopus and House of Mystery. These movies were so good at packing in menageries of oddity into their cheap and quick desire to make people laugh and scream that it's hard not to gawk at them today. Plus, with some authentically antiquated creepy visuals and a stellar performance from Lionel Atwill, there are some nice thrills to supplement the trashy hilarity.

For six months, New York has been wracked with murders committed every full moon by the rather dully named Moon Killer. Reporter Lee Taylor, a cowardly klutz, is looking for news on the murders and stumbles across an autopsy on one of the victims led by Dr. Xavier, head of a prominent medical research institute. Not only do the cops learn that the victims are being partially cannibalized, but they reveal that each of the victims was butchered post-mortem by a particular brain scalpel only used in the Xavier Institute. Xavier and all his scientists are now under suspicion. Xavier insists on the privilege of conducting his own investigation to help exonerate his Institute's reputation; this being the '30s, the police agree. We meet each of the doctor's staff in turn. Dr. Wells is a cannibalism specialist, but he lost an arm years ago and therefore isn't really super great at crushing people's tracheae, which is usually how the victims met their end. Dr. Haines is the most capable physically, but he's (initially) the least suspicious, as his deal is just that he reads porn. Dr. Duke is a rude, shrieking bastard, but he's also paralyzed and thus not really the strangle-murdering sort. And Dr. Rowitz gets creepy framing and has scars and an eyepatch, plus a scientific fascination with the moon, but he seems harmless enough. Taylor ultimately finds out where Dr. Xavier's testing of himself and his staff will take place: his creaky upstate mansion, a suitably aged and shadowy locale. Xavier and his scientists, along with Xavier's daughter Joan and his maid and butler, pack themselves into the house, with Taylor not far behind. Xavier will find his killer, alright--but he should know that keeping his killer so close is playing with fire.

Like many an Old Dark House film, Doctor X is part comedy as well as part horror-mystery. This works to varying effects throughout the film. Much of this comedy is centered around our ostensible protagonist, Lee Taylor, a character whom other critics hate so much you'd think he was Jar Jar Binks. I find him sort of charming, but then, I also have severe brain damage from having sat through the vast plethora of comic relief reporters who crop up in horror films from the 1920s through the 1940s. That he ends up with Joan Xavier in the end is something of a male entitlement issue, a conformance to tropes better left dead, but Fay Wray's performance is entirely fitting that of the daughter of a mad scientist, and while she could definitely do better when it comes to bedmates, you'd better believe she's wearing the fucking pants if they go places. I trust her judgment in men, and I do find some of Taylor's shtick at least a little funny, so I'll be kind to him. The movie never made me laugh out loud, but it had a consistent pace and rhythm to it that helped draw me into the experience.

This movie is so old that a character has to explain to us how a joy buzzer works. Contrariwise, this movie also features Prohibition jokes and a character entering what is obviously a brothel, salaciously-clad ladies included. Keep it classy, 1930s. And don't forget, Dr. Haines' "textbook" turned out to be full of "French Art," which is made all the funnier by the fact that Xavier calls Haines a "most studious worker." But this changes, as the movie goes on, and we see that Haines is definitely some sort of sicko. After all, it's not quite professional behavior to stare at the swimsuit-clad body of one's boss for prolonged periods of time, is it? That Haines is physically abled and the seeming meekest of all the scientists makes it stand to reason that he's the killer--he and Xavier himself, who the movie beautifully never keeps above suspicion, especially by having him played by Lionel Atwill. But nope, this is a '30s horror film so of course the real solution to the mystery is something far less comprehensible. Spoilers ahead.

The killer is Wells, and he's able to strangle people because he knows how to make new limbs. While his field is ostensibly cannibalism studies, we find out that he's actually been working on something called "synthetic flesh" (a phrase which he ends up saying in the best voice possible no less than three times in the film's climax). Not only can he recreate his missing arm, but he uses the synthetic flesh to makes a monstrous face and head for himself, resembling something like the handsome older brother of the closet-monster from The Brain That Wouldn't Die. The scene in which he applies the synthetic flesh has some artsy, proto-psychedelic flair to it. He then explains that he wasn't in Africa to study cannibalism, but was instead actually there to use the flesh that natives eat to develop his synthetic flesh.

This makes no sense. If Wells was never a cannibal, or even particularly interested in cannibalism outside of--I don't know--securing meat from the cannibals, why the hell does he start eating the corpses?! Maybe he wants to convince that the public that this killer is a maniac and not a respectable doctor, but this argument falls flat when he considered; 1) Wells also butchers his victims with a scalpel, which is why the Xavier Institute is under suspicion to begin with; 2) Wells is a known expert on cannibalism. That's what he's a doctor in! Also, how does studying the feeding patterns of cannibals provide insight into the creation of an organic flesh substitute? Is synthetic flesh refined in the human gullet or something? Is that why he was taking bites out of his victims...? Maybe that's why the comedy is here--it's conforming to type as an ODH film, but it also helps cover the fact that They Just Didn't Care. Or, perhaps more properly, that It's Just a Show, and We Should Really Just Relax.

Doctor X can fade into a dull sit at times, but it really is one of the best of its kind. Filmed at a time before mass film censorship, it takes full advantage of the guttural sensationalism at the time and comes up with something nearly as fucked up as West of Zanzibar and Murders in the Zoo. It's absolutely not perfect, but I watch it every October. Join me, won't you?

More Spookyween delites can be found at my Patreon page, and at the Facebook page for the A-List!

West of Zanzibar (1928), by Tod Browning

...huh. It's not every week I get to start out with sepia.

But this isn't a usual week, is it? Oh no. This is the start of SPOOKYWEEN '17. This month, we'll be examining no less than twelve horror films taking us from the 1920s to the 2010s to celebrate the Halloween spirit. Kicking things off is a return to Tod Browning and Lon Chaney with the unbelievably brutal 1928 feature, West of Zanzibar--a silent horror film matched only by the uncanny strangeness of The Unknown. West of Zanzibar does its best to break every single taboo in the book, and given its early release date that makes it remarkable, though one finds that the film's age has also given it some truly reprehensible qualities.

Phroso (Lon Chaney) is a magician at a carnival, because this is a Tod Browning movie; he has a beautiful young wife named Anna, whom he loves more than anything. However, Anna's attentions stray and she takes a lover--said lover, a man named Crane, wants to take her out to his ivory plantation in Tanzania, but she realizes who she really loves and doesn't really want to go along. While arguing with Crane, Phroso gets knocked over a railing and breaks his back, and is unable to stop the two from leaving.

Time passes, Phroso discovers that Anna has returned to the city, but she's come here to die. She abandons her daughter, doubtlessly sired by Crane in Phroso's mind, inside a church. Phroso takes her and over the course of several years he commences his lengthy revenge scheme against the ivory-trader. First of all, he uses his stage magic to take over a Tanzanian tribe, and begins directing that tribe, with both authority and performer's tricks (including a fake voodoo monster), to break up Crane's ivory trade. (At this point the ex-performer has taken on the name of rather appropriate named of "Dead-Legs.") As this happens, one of Phroso's minions is busy raising Maizie, Anna's daughter, in her shabby seaside bar/drug house/brothel. Maizie has long desired to escape this place, with its boggy marshes of cheap income and illicit substances, but fortunately, a man has arrived who claims to know who Maizie's father is. We already know that this man is another of Dead-Legs' minions. He takes her out to Phroso's village of horrors, where it is revealed that her happy fate was all a lie, a cover for the world of drugs, drinking, starvation, and rape that Phroso has been setting up all this time. Sure, the former magician's doctor henchman takes pity on her...but this is only the beginning. At last it comes time to capture Crane, and reveal to him the truth; he then intends to kill Crane, which will in turn force the natives to enact their traditional ritual of burning a dead man's family members to join him in the afterlife. Except...well. Crane isn't Maizie's father. Anna never went away with him. She hated him for crippling her husband, so why would she? So who's Maizie's real father, I wonder...?

Yes, West of Zanzibar is very effective. It takes an oddly progressive approach towards using intensified sleaze as a source of horror, predating movies like Bloodsucking Freaks and the H.G. Lewis canon by decades. Sometimes you can get scary out of slimy. We humans don't like our rules broken--we don't like seeing young women left to dry out after being forced on a months-long drinking binge, for instance. We don't like seeing something that was once love turn to hate, and we are terrified of so much of our relationships with our children. All over and throughout, the movie breaks taboos, showing us nary a clean house or tidy city street. Its characters, from their faces down to the clothes they wear, are bitter and gruesome. Tod Browning drives home the fact that grotesquery is the name of the game by showing montages of enormous spiders rising from the waters or tangled in their webs, alongside worms, grubs, and lizards writhing in river mud. It's unpleasant.

But unpleasant is just the first layer. There's one more taboo that Browning decides to break, and that's the race taboo. The exploitation of black people for horror value in movies starts at the beginning of the history of movies and carries on into the present. This is some of the worst racism I've ever seen in a movie. The Africans depicted in the movie embody the most despicable "jungle native" stereotypes white people have ever come up with; they dance wildly, speak broken English, run screaming from "evil spirits," rape white women, and engage in meaninglessly violent religious rituals. For all the likable qualities of this movie, the movie should absolutely be condemned for its attempts to exploit racial fears of its era in an attempt to ramp up its horror elements. Period.

There are still reasons, of course, as to why I reviewed this movie--even besides the fact that there are almost no other '20s horror films appropriate for the site that I like enough. We get to see some glimpses of 1920s carny life, including a strange comedy fire-eating act where a man started smoking both ends of his cigarette, then eats it, decides he likes the taste, and starts gobbling down lit matches. I dunno, the other carnies seem to think it's hilarious. Phroso's act, what little we see of it, is pretty neat as well. But of course, that's because the man playing Phroso is a genius.

Lon Chaney Sr. gives one of his best performances here. He manages to perfectly capture a magician's theatricality in the same rhythm as his petty, mirthful cruelty, and he's more than capable of convincingly turning that cruelty into flat-out barbarism. The Phroso we meet at the beginning is a handsome, well-groomed man dressed in a tux; by the film's end he's wearing greasy rags, shaved himself bald, and worn his face down to an angry snarl. His former soft-spokenness is replaced with the tongue of a cynical dock pickpocket. My favorite part of watching silent films is lip-reading the performances. If you do it with Chaney, I swear you can hear him talk. Chaney's costar, Lionel Barrymore, has seen his performance heavily criticized in the wake of the Internet, but I thought he did fine here as an asshole with basically no redeeming qualities. Browning would get a chance to direct Barrymore in a more complex role in The Devil-Doll, which I'm sure I'll talk about on here at some point.

I also do have to give credit to Edward Rolf Boensnes, who made the soundtrack to the version I saw on Web Archive, available here. The music is catchy and fits the movie's tone of mind-warping horror. If you're going to watch this movie, I definitely recommend the version with Boensnes' music on it.

West of Zanzibar is a tough movie to praise because of how thorough its bigotry is. It's not something we can dismiss easily, either--I can't just tell you to skip past the racist bits and watch the good Lon Chaney parts instead. What should be done is that we should talk about this movie, and learn from it what our society once did wrong and what it's still doing wrong. That this still happens is the scariest Halloween horror of them all! Well, rest assured. Things for the rest of this month are going to be notably less controversial.

If you want to get the rest of the Spookyween reviews early, now's a good time to subscribe on Patreon! Plus, like the A-List on Facebook to get cool updates.

Don't Go in the Woods (1982), by James Bryan

You know, this movie brings SpOoKyWeEn to such a perfect close that I had better hope I have something this good for next year. Good thing I do! Don't Go in the Woods was, for a number of years, the closest thing I had to a favorite movie of all time. Not just my favorite horror movie...my favorite movie. Ev-er. Now, comments like that are decently common on the A-List. It is, after all, my List of A-class trash movies--the reason why I had to do things like a Godzilla Retrospective is that no one wants to hear about how I love every single movie I review. But it's movies like Don't Go in the Woods that caused me to start keeping an A-List to begin with. I have seen this movie more times than I can count. And so I think I'm going to have to close out Spookyween's look back at four decades of horror with a review that's a bit more frank and stream-of-consciousness than normal.

Don't Go in the Woods, at least for the first big chunk of it, is maybe best described as an anthology of vignettes. Essentially, a bunch of (mostly) nameless people Do Go in the Woods and are butchered by a large unwashed lunatic who carries a spear, wears rosaries on his head, and lives in a convincingly disgusting shack full of trophies/junk stolen from his victims. Along the way we follow a group of campers named Joanie, Peter, Ingrid, and Craig as they slowly begin to understand--too late--that there is someone out there hunting them. That's about as High Concept at it gets. And that's where director James Bryan succeeds. With a relatively (and deliberately) simple premise, he left himself room to fill in all the little nooks and crannies with pure oddity. Remarkably, both these oddities and the main plot (following the four young campers) are extremely satisfying. The movie succeeds in its event-content, and as I'll get into later, you'd better believe that this isn't the only type of content it does well.

I can't bring up the strangeness of this movie without describing it, and yet it permeates the movie so profusely that I can only scratch the surface--which is good, because then, as is my constant goal, you will be forced to watch the movie yourself.† When you take into account the reports that Bryan did make every ounce of weirdness on purpose, you recognize that this movie has a level of genius to it. Now, while I just said I want you to watch the movie, there is some stuff I have to spoil, so if you want the full experience, which I will absolutely recommend over my writing about it, Don't Finish This Paragraph. There are three scenes in particular that I refer to. The first is the one involving Dale and his...wife? Mother? Sister? In any case, Dale and his companion are two gaudily-dressed dweebs who stand out in a movie largely populated by gaudily-dressed dweebs. And if you've ever met me and my fashion sense in real life, you know what it means for me to describe someone or something as "gaudy." Dale just wants to take a photo of "the train" pulling in (there's no way a track runs through a forest this thick); she is more intent on annoying the fuck out of the audience in the most amusing way possible with her constant, contrast whining of "Daaale! Daaale! Wait for me, Dale!" Next, there are Cherry and Dick. They are a newlywed couple consummating their marriage. And their names are Cherry. And. Dick. May they and their mobile home RIP in Peace. And finally, there is the odd, odd sequence with Wheelchair Guy. I will say no more, even with a previous spoiler tag in place, but let me just say this: I don't think people in wheelchairs usually try to climb mountains unsupervised. Always, always, does this sequence get to me...

Can you start to see what I mean? I hope you can. I like to think this is a movie that can sell itself even in vagueness (even if I pump my admittedly-flawed bombast into things as usual), and I hope that becomes more apparent as I write on. In regards to that bombast, I really should be more quiet about this movie. It deserves a better analysis--not to say that any of the other movies I've reviewed didn't deserve me shrieking hysterically about them. I am sort of moving towards a thesis here--that's been planned--so I think trying to actually get academic might help in the long run...

With that being said: this movie is actually pretty scary. All the movies I've done for Spookyween are, in their own way, and that's why I picked them. Weasels Rip My Flesh has a hopeless grunginess to it; I Eat Your Skin has an atmospheric soundtrack and some eerie shots; and Daughter of Horror terrifies me from beginning to end. Don't Go in the Woods keeps its voice way, way down on its creeps, and encourages repeat viewings. For example, when we meet the four campers, they talk about rabies and what to do if you see an animal that could be rabid. Craig warns the group that it's not normal for forest animals to eagerly approach humans: "No animal in its right mind would dare bother us," he says. The scene cuts on that sentence, meaning we're supposed to pay attention to it. That leaves us with the impression that it's meant as foreshadowing: there is an "animal" who's gonna "bother" them, and no, he's not in his right mind. And in the scene where poor Dale the photographer is killed, his body is thrown down onto some rocks...next to a lake the four campers are playing in. At once, Hitchcockian suspense kicks in: we the audience know that there's a slaughtered corpse right next to our heroes, but they don't. Add this onto the fact that Bryan clearly knows how to use and place a camera. Murders are bookended with wide shots of the woods, which gives us a sense that nature is almost apathetic to what's happening here. And it shows how fucked the killer's victims truly are: when the cops finally get involved, they say that they've found around fifty bodies. The killer has been doing this for years, if not decades, and no one ever knew. Brrrr.

Of course, the movie is also laden with some more overt horror--yep, this is a Video Nasty, a member of that league of honored greats banned or sliced to ribbons in the UK by censors. And that means that the deaths are pretty gory. We never see any organs or entrails a la Lucio Fulci, but cinematography and blood packs come together in a way that makes it nicely visceral. Plus, it helps that there's usually something to make us care about the people being diced...

I do have to talk about the characters before I go into my conclusion. This movie manages to establish better characters in five minutes than five hours of DC movies did--and I know that's a cheap joke, but I mean to say more that there was a great script on this one, much more than "cheap" stereotypically allows. (Back to that in a second.) Peter is whiny, but ultimately courageous; Ingrid is snarky, but more reserved and chill than Joanie; Joanie is okay with smashing her friends' hands with rocks for fun (in a lovable way); and Craig is a nerd, obsessed with his own apparent knowledge of the woods but still being pretty dumb and useless. We also meet a Sheriff who is still somehow not the most corpulent police officer I've ever met, his pinball-playing deputy, and an attractive, compassionate nurse. Though none of them really get to say much, we get a feel for who they are, and they seem like real people. Maybe it's because their acting/dubbing is notably awkward. But it's well-acted awkward, a "we-knew-what-we-were-doing" awkward. I absolutely love it when movies do that, because somehow, in an age where "nerd movies" dominate the box office, we still can't fucking put nerds or awkward people in movies and have it be more sophisticated than goddamn Big Bang Theory. This movie--in its acting, direction, scripting, and editing--is a triumph for nerds. But cool nerds. Because James Bryan is one of the Cool Guys, or at least he can sell himself to me as such.

So I said earlier that I was building towards a thesis with this, and that's true. When I was preparing my review for this movie, I remembered something one of my professors told me in regards to the idea of a literary canon. She reminded us that a "classic" book has really never meant much more than the phrase we use almost as an idiom, "It's a classic!" It really does just mean a book that a large group of people happened to like very, very much, and begin to obsess over. We take the idea of "canon" in both literature and film pretty seriously, and I think most people take for granted the idea that something stereotypically great like Citizen Kane is going to be a good watch, and, perhaps consequently, that that which is unlike Citizen Kane is an inferior grade of film. And mainstream critical views have generally lauded praise on movies that, like Citizen Kane, have good budgets††--to the point, in fact, where I do think some receptions have colored their views based on how much the movie cost. And I say "receptions" here rather than opinions; I'm not going to be a dick and claim the right to critique what individual people think and say about movies I like or don't like. Opinions in crowds, however, form receptions, and we've seen that receptions can be engineered. The Golden Raspberries, for example, have the tendency to preemptively or flippantly pick movies to nominate for their Worst Movie categories, based on the fact that the members don't have to see the movies to nominate them. And while, yeah, the Razzies are basically just for fun and whatnot, and they clearly pick movies based on infamy, they are still well-known enough to leave a social impact, and critics have changed their minds in modern times about many of the movies that the Razzies helped condemn, like Heaven's Gate, Mommie Dearest, and hell, even Howard the Duck and Star Trek V. Of course, there's no objective way to determine if anyone was "wrong" or not--and the Razzies at least make sure to go after movies that actually made it to wide release, so there's there not an issue of budget here, but you'll see that critical culture has difficulty getting away from judging movies based on expense. Note that so many of them frequently call Ed Wood--mediocre at worst, next to some of the shit that's been made--the worst director ever because he and his movies were cheap. And so Don't Go in the Woods left me one general statement, which I want to apply both to the obscure "trash" I review here, as well as a lot of experimental or unusual "bad" movies of better budgetary standing, like At Long Last Love: we should be fairer to movies.

I condemn bashing movies that one hasn't seen, but more relevant to Don't Go in the Woods: I condemn bashing movies that had little money behind them, by that factor and by what ramifications it had on the film. By that, I guess I mean I want mainstream critical examination of movies that, by our current capitalist standards, fail. I want people to learn to appreciate the unique qualities of amateur acting, directing, scripting, and what those qualities mean--I want them to tease out detail and substance from things that we've already decided have none. And in doing so, I like to think that we'll learn something. I can't say I know what, but I'm starting to see inklings. And even if the best we can conjure for these movies is ironic, humorous appreciation...I'm sure we can glean something from that. I'm of the opinion that everything goes down forever, and there is nothing that is meaningless. We humans, I think, get a little snobby when it comes to deciding what things have what importance, and I know that's because we are short for this world. We only have so much time spent awake before we die. But let's be idealistic. Let's look into the past, review all the forgotten films that have come before, that no one watched or liked, and see what we can find.

Because while you watch this movie, I want you to remember that the classics we take for granted are just the ice above the water--the real heft is in the dark depths.

So that's Spookyween! Thanks for stopping by--grab some candy corn on the way out. It's the best I can offer as apology for the Sin of Didacticism, plus, I lied about there being a cash prize for the Costume Party. Next up will be a quartet of meetings for the Book Club of Desolation, because it's finally ~*~*BOOKVEMBER~*~*. So hang on tight, 'cuz y'ain't seen nuthin' yet!

---

† Do not watch the bootlegs on YouTube. Those are, as far as I know, derived from the Video Nasty cuts, and most of the gore is removed, along with the soundtrack, for fuck knows what reason. I'm going to assume that that means music is too controversial for the average British censor.

†† Citizen Kane cost ~$840,000 in 1941, which is equivalent to roughly $14 million as of 2016. I do not consider this a small budget.

Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979), by Nathan Schiff

I think I finally boiled it all down. People are nostalgic for their childhoods--or have a tendency to be. They want to see their childhoods represented in media, and this includes teenager-hood. The problem is there's a barrier between adolescence and adulthood, so that when one tries to represent one's lifestyle as an adolescent in adulthood, it comes out garbled, nonsensical, and embarrassing. It's best to leave representing kids to the kids themselves. That's where Kids Goofing Off comes along--the subgenre of horror-trash cinema that is magical and excellent. A lot of us made horror movies when we were kids, when we had no money but a reasonable number of friends, and a bottle of expired Karo syrup. Not a lot of us, however, had the courage and integrity to see to the release of their work. Welcome back once more to SPOOKYWEEN, my friends, and for the '70s, we'll be looking at white Afros, awkward 'staches, gore, and, of course, good ol' nihilism.

I'm so happy I get to talk about Nathan Schiff. In his late teens and early twenties Schiff decided to put together three backyard Super 8 horror flicks, beginning with Weasels Rip My Flesh and continuing into Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980) and They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore (1985). A later entry in a similar vein called Vermilion Eyes was made in 1991, and with the other three movies was scheduled to be released by Image Entertainment--however, it was nixed at the last minute, probably due to the fact that Vermilion Eyes is a hard fucking watch. You see, Nathan Schiff's films carry a very particular brand of nihilism. The seriousness of it is hard to discern. Here, in Weasels, philosophical musings take second place to yucky monster gore. Later, as we'll probably see, we see thematic arcs regarding the death of hope, the uselessness of dreams, the inevitability of an awful fate--but let's start light. Let's start with weasels.

We open with some pretentious narration a la Criswell from Ed Wood's movies. This is followed by a murder scene that has no bearing on the film that follows, a la the opening strangulation scene from Beast of Yucca Flats. A space probe from Venus collects some radioactive goo. The probe goes down near Long Island, and when a rabid weasel bites two New Yawk kids, they take vengeance on it by pouring the slimy contents of the crashed probe into the weasel burrow. The weasel mutates and begins to spread its rabies plague. Enter Inspector James Cameron, who must have directed Terminator 2. He and his partner investigate the weasels but are kidnapped by Dr. Sendam (put it in a mirror, then you'll get it), who promptly reveals that mutant weasel blood is the secret to eternal life. I dare not reveal more. It's a tight film and I leave its secrets to you.

Weasels Rip My Flesh is a fascinating movie on almost every front. It is a better movie than I could ever write or direct at 16 (and trust me, I know from experience), and yet it is also rife with amateur's mistakes that enforce a certain layer of charm. You can sometimes hear the direction ("c'mon!" most commonly), and the special effects speak for themselves. The weasels are blobs of clay and sausage, and occasionally sport tentacles. Sometimes they melt into puddles of gore for no reason, and sometimes they go all Night of the Lepus, biologically morphing into zoomed-in hamster stock footage. They add surrealism to the film, surely. But so does everything else. Especially the mustaches. We all remember the folks who would try to grow mustaches in high school. If you ever missed taking a hard look at high school mustaches, this movie will take you back. As will the Dirty Harry references.

Crowning off all this is the fact that it is captured on Super 8, which the late '70s equivalent of whatever the hell was used to shoot Five Across the Eyes. All sound is post-dubbed, all music borrowed from the library cues that haunt the halls of '60s Something Weird fodder. The auditory and visual crackling marks this as a relic from the past, a valuable glimpse into a long-gone era. All media is valuable, in its own sense, as signifiers of the things we lose with the death of generations. Now we can see what they were doing in Long Island in the summer of '79.

Weasels Rip My Flesh is mostly hilarious, and but also a touch spooky. I consider it one of my Spookyween classics. You can spare 63 minutes, can't you...?

I Eat Your Skin (1964), by Del Tenney

Voodoo charts a perfect timeline of my life. If you want a voodoo movie that shows me at the ecstatic, youthful, hectic middle of my relationship with these sorts of movies, check out Trash Canon gem Crypt of Dark Secrets. If you want to see me at the far limits I've found now, where I'm largely just reflective and need something really tremendous to whet my appetite, managing a blog of memories more than having true, exciting adventures, check out Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. This is the voodoo movie--and indeed, the movie, period--that started it all. I Eat Your Skin is the first trash movie I ever saw. I watched it when I was ten, with my eight-year-old brother and my aunt and uncle. My aunt got the 50 Chilling Classics collection of public domain horror movies from another of my aunts. The four of us went in blind and it was up, up, and away from there.

I had never before imagined that acting, as a thing, could be bad, before laying my eyes on this. It was a goddamn blast. We didn't really riff it--it riffed itself. We laughed a lot and even got a few chills here and there. Well, my brother and I did at least, probably. After that, we tracked down Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space and all that. We'd been watching '50s monster movies for years, like Them! and The Giant Gila Monster, but we began to learn there was something new. Something alien. We met a lot of strange movies when we finally bought 50 Chilling Classics for ourselves. I Eat Your Skin came back time and time again, to be joined by Medusa, Cathy's Curse, Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon, The Alpha Incident, Demons of Ludlow, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Horrors of Spider Island, Driller Killer, Oasis of the Zombies, Revenge of Dr. X, The Witches' Mountain, and probably everything else in that damn box and all the other collections like it. A veritable smorgasbord of weird, shitty horror. I needed more--I found MST3K and it still wasn't enough. (Even as Laserblast, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Deadly Bees, Boggy Creek II, and Space Mutiny flooded into my awareness, and my heart.) Fortunately, I Eat Your Skin was historically double-billed with I Drink Your Blood. Figuring I'd be running into another black and white zombie movie, I was stunned by the display of rabies, gore, and hippies that unleashed itself into my eyeballs. I began to comprehend these "exploitation movies," and as teenhood dawned, I came across the annals of I-Mockery, the Cinema Snob, and Bleeding Skull. My formative years were shaped and stirred as I witnessed a bottomless sea of gore, nudity, and monstrosities beyond imagination.

I shared my movies, with some hits (Troll 2 nearly killed everyone) and some misses (King of the Zombies does not a good sleepover make). I even got the high school to have a One Night Only event for some of these movies, which is where Troll 2 knocked 'em dead, along with Don't Go in the Woods. I am proud to say that for two years, I was the Captain of the University of Minnesota Morris Bad Movie Club, or BMC for short. If there are any veterans of it out there, you know we saw both glory...and horror. It was our war, our private little war, and there were heroes as there were sacrifices. But what I mean to say is: it all started here. Some of the best days of my life started with I Eat Your Skin. So what better place to carry on the SPOOKYWEEN horror extravaganza from here?

Writer Tom Harris is in the soup with his editor, Duncan Fairchild. "Harry" Harris has been spending too much time helping lonely young housewives cheat on their husbands and not enough on composing his next Haydock-'n'-Harmon style potboiler. Duncan is forcing Tom and his own wife, Coral (which everyone always pronounces as "Carl"), to go to a Pacific island so that Tom can get some inspiration and make them more money. The island in question? Voodoo Island, home of snakes, zombies, and beautiful women. After an attack by one of the zombified locals, featuring the most hilarious decapitation set to film, Tom learns of the voodoo sacrifices of the island, and the mystery only deepens from there. As he falls in love with Jeanine, daughter of the local scientist, he'll need to solve it before their island Heaven becomes a Hell.

Does I Eat Your Skin hold up after all this time? Or have I grown too cynical with age to enjoy its cheesy, clumsy charms? I can say that fortunately I continue to enjoy the experience. I have perhaps moved on in some regards--for example, the mere presence of voodoo doesn't bring chills to me simply by merit of being some mysterious foreign religion. Now I know more about voodoo and I understand that there's not really such a thing as a "weird" religion (well, I mean, besides Scientology--excuse me, Sci***ology). There's almost certainly something racist in I Eat Your Skin, with the black pagan islanders trying to sacrifice a Blonde Caucasian Virgin™ and everything, something which I didn't pay attention to as a kid. It kills the mood a little bit, but of course the true evil behind the voodoo cult turns out to be a white man. His alias's name, though, is Papa Negro. That brings it back to uncomfortable a little bit.

But the movie is groovy, the shadows and zombies are creepy, and the dialogue is amazing. Any movie that uses the word "praytell" as part of its snark is going to be top of the charts for me. The acting, especially from the lady playing Coral, almost reaches self-parody at times. Did I mention, too, that this was the first movie I saw to have a sex scene in it? It was the early '60s, though, so nothing gets shown, and I wouldn't realize what it was until years later, when the sheer comedy of the scene wore off. There's also a wonderful zombie transformation sequence when some poor asshole is injected with the zombie drug and starts becoming one of the flesh-eating fiends with some Larry Talbot-style dissolve cuts. 

On top of all this, the movie doesn't drag, unlike most of the movies which I adored in my childhood that I've tried to rediscover over the years. That, more than anything else in my life right now, is important. I run a magazine, I write books, I work a day job. I have finally reached the stage of maturity where I cannot afford to watch movies without merit. Thankfully I have some solid luck these days, in these matters. And I have a great and bountiful past behind me to examine anew. Every scene in I Eat Your Skin flows well into one another, and while there is some dwelling (especially on the voodoo dancing), usually forward kinetic motion is a thing. There was some degree of care behind this, from the man who also brought us The Horror of Party Beach. There was enough to hook me. Just as easily, I could've slipped away from this path forever in the moment of watching this. Imagine if I had watched fucking Cathy's Curse instead of this. I would probably end up just watching Casablanca for a living. Assuming such a thing is tenable. (You'd think people would stop paying for reviews of Casablanca after awhile.)

Whatever. Be cautious but know that I Eat Your Skin is a party in your living room. Beget a trash legacy of your own with what you find in it.

Daughter of Horror (1955), by John Parker

When it comes to Halloween, I think Shakespeare captured it best in one of his lesser-known and yet still classic plays, Titus Andronicus:

Spooky scary skeletons, and shivers down your spine

Shrieking skulls will shock your soul and seal your doom tonight

Spooky scary skeletons, they speak with such a screech

You'll shake and shudder in surprise when you hear the zombies shriek

How do I talk about my favorite holiday on Earth? I have lived twenty-two Halloweens and with few exceptions the day, and surrounding month, is the one time I am guaranteed to be happy. In case you haven't noticed, I like horror, and for most of my life horror has been the spark that has allowed me to survive depression, anxiety, and all the horrors the world can heap on an individual. Jack-o-lanterns, ghosts and goblins, and indeed, spooky skeletons all represent the force that drags me back to this world and keeps me living in it. And so for the entire month of October, I'll be making a decade-by-decade journey through four of my absolute favorite trash horror films. So what I'm saying is...WELCOME TO SPOOKYWEEN!!!

(Insert celebratory music cue here.)

I found Daughter of Horror a year or so ago, and for a time made watching a twice-a-month tradition. I guess in a lot of ways the film shocked my conception of trash--though I'd found crazy-weird movies from eras before the '60s on previous occasions, I generally went forth with the assumption that Blood Feast had to break certain taboos before the deluge could start. Turns out, nope. People have always wanted to break with tradition, including the traditions that allow their films to be remembered and preserved by audiences. Shoulda known it from literature. That magical group of people who always press their beautiful, wonderful vision have always existed. The mid-1950s seem a time completely immune to trash, with their obsession with political correctness--the kind that tries to spare white suburbanites the vapors from the act of mentioning black people, not the kind that white suburbanites complain about today. Certainly a female-led movie about the agonies of poverty and mental illness would be beyond their scope, right? Wrong. Daughter of Horror began life as Dementia, a movie completely without dialogue. It was unable to find release until several years after its creation, and was released as Daughter of Horror with cheesy narration by Ed McMahon--this was the title under which I was introduced to it. The narration, I've found, does little to disguise the fact that this is a genuinely upsetting movie. And it never fades, no matter how many times I watch it.

As I said, Daughter of Horror contains no dialogue, and is largely a string of vignettes, though they do form a cohesive narrative. A young woman lives in a crummy hotel in a large, alienated city. She suffers from some sort of anxiety disorder and is prone to hallucinations. She travels through the city, witnessing muggings, child poverty, and domestic abuse, eventually coming across a scummy man who pins her to a light pole. He gives her what seems to be a pot joint (she squints and becomes more confused when she smokes it), and leads her into the limo of a rich fatcat, played by Bruno VeSota. Let me tell you, if you need a smarmy, corpulent jerk in your movie, Bruno VeSota is the way to go. He also played asshole greaseballs in The Undead, Daddy-O, Attack of the Giant Leeches, and A Bucket of Blood. He works magnificently here, and so every time I see those movies I think of this one. Anyway, we slowly learn that the young woman has always had an awful life. A cemetery flashback reveals to us that she came from a broken home, and she has been haunted by images of her father since she was a child. After a long sequence where the rich dude eats a huge dinner in front of her, without offering her a single bite, the young woman is nearly assaulted, and she murders her captor. Of course, this must not go unpunished. The rest of the movie is a relentless chase as the young woman struggles to elude a policeman identical to her father, who seems much too happy with the idea of arresting her. This is where the movie's imagery shifts from bizarre to outright cruel. The ending, of course, doesn't let up.

Watching this movie is like going through a tunnel of sound--cold, angry, stressful sound. And it gets louder and louder until, a mere fifty-five minutes later, it just stops. Like real mental illness, it is an assault upon the senses: deliberately confusing, painful, and traumatizing at all ventures. To envision a movie like this in 1955 is extraordinary. This is probably the only movie I've seen that does such a good job of capturing the fear of mental illness, the lack of peace--the impulse to always run, always hungrily desiring something better and never getting it, and feeling guilty for it, and feeling like the world will eagerly and desperately turn on you the first second it gets. The sense of never knowing what's real and what's just a dream in a hotel room. This is not glamorous, a la magic pixie dream girls. Mental illness is war and death. And this movie--independent of Ed McMahon narration--gets that.

Is it exploiting all this? Surely. But there is also something compelling about the movie from a feminist perspective. The villains of the movie are abusers--particularly abusers who are men. Abusive pimps, husbands, fathers. Male privilege, and male aggression, are the antagonists of the film. Though women are not portrayed in a particularly positive light, there is emphasis cast on the dark nature of men. In the 1950s this would have been an affront to a strong patriarchy, one which used the notion of political correctness to normalize and hide abuses both in public and behind closed doors. Actually, that still happens today, and we still have issues with talking about it. Don't know if Parker wanted us to talk about it, but I'm doing it now, so it seems to be something of an inevitable consequence.

It's hard for me to find faults in Daughter of Horror. It's actually one of the few movies that I would encourage being longer--seriously, it is only fifty-five minutes long. Apparently it was cut for its 1955 release, but I can't determine if the available versions retain those cuts. If they do, I really wonder what was in them and how much footage they entail. In any case, I am still content with the version we have, even if, as ever, I am upset by the potential implied by lost footage. (Talk to me about King Kong sometime.) 

I have nothing coherent to say about Halloween, save for the fact that I love it. The same applies to this movie. I love it. It's creepy and dark and it actually scares me. 'Nuff said.

See you next time, when Spookyween takes the '60s!