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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Plaga Zombie (1997), by Pablo Parés and Hernán Sáez

A young man is wandering through Bubble-Lens Alley after midnight. He is jumped by a gang of skunk-striped punks with incredibly bizarre facepaint--thankfully, he is saved at the last minute by a mysterious beer-drinking interloper. It turns out, however, that said interloper is a zombie! Cut to the apartment of Mike Taylor and his roommate, former doctor Bill Johnson. Johnson is depressed after losing his license to practice following "the accident," and spends most of his day clipping the leaves off of ferns. As we meet Mike and Bill, we also learn the story of John West and Willie Boxer, two ex-wrestlers--the former wants to get back in the ring with his old partner, while the other just wants to sit in bed and smoke. Eventually Mike is abducted by aliens, who cut him open and rub bubble gum on the back of his neck. Okay, that stuff on his back isn't actually bubble gum--it's more that the skin on the back of his neck (and his whole back) is beginning to rot off. And the same thing is happening to Willie, which is the source of his lethargy, in fact. Bill and John join forces, along with Bill's geek neighbor Max, in a desperate struggle against the extraterrestrially-powered living dead. It is this struggle which will consume the rest of the movie until the inevitable downbeat ending.

Plaga Zombie may be Argentina's first zombie film, and if the efforts that follow this one are anything like it, my world just got a little bigger and brighter. It can be tough to watch a lot of horror comedies, especially from the '90s...and especially if zombies are involved. That even the analysis of the idiocy of the scores of thousands of bad zombie movies made over the years is now exhausted is a sign that unless someone does have that startlingly-good fresh idea, the genre is beyond dead, and indeed beyond any sort of topical joke about undeath as well. The one mercy of being bludgeoned with so many of these awful movies is that I've gotten used to knowing when exactly to turn something off. Plaga Zombie, however, looked like a positive outing at first glance, and I'm glad to say it lived up to my initial optimism.

The first realization I came to after watching the movie was how exactly it accomplished its blend of horror and comedy so nicely--besides being just an hour long, that is. Unlike the makers of a lot of horror comedies, directors Parés and Sáez are aware that the best horror comedies are ones where the comedy breaks the tension, and logically plays off of the story the horror parts set up. Rarely are there asides in Plaga Zombie--compare it to Poultrygeist, which will gleefully interrupt its own non-narrative just to bring us a close-up shot of a greasy butthole shitting on the camera. The goofiness comes out in the form of slapstick during the fight scenes, or the actors mugging; sometimes we do cut to something else, but it's always brief, like the cutaway to the zombie giggling stupidly as it tazes itself in the face with a defibrillator. As a result, the movie is actually funny. It doesn't explain its jokes; it doesn't repeat them until they lose all coherence; it doesn't dwell on any one bit for an uncomfortably long time. If you laugh, you laugh. If you don't, you wait for the next part. It's plain and simple.

While the movie never succeeds in being actually creepy, it is still an extremely professional effort. Plaga Zombie was made for a shocking $120, and it contains more actors and extras than movies I've seen made for a thousand times as much. If Parés and Sáez were not film students, they were auto-didacts from having watched a tremendous deal of movies, one of which was almost certainly Evil Dead. The cinematography is almost always appropriate in framing and mobility, and it's one of the few movies I've seen that uses a bubble-lens in a way that works. And the effects are suitably grotesque, as well. Partly-melted Neopolitan ice cream makes surprisingly impressive zombie vomit, while a lot of filmmakers could learn from how cake frosting can be used to make undead face-paint. There wasn't a single moment where I wasn't entertained by the movie, and that's not even getting into the weird shit.

There's one "weird shit" scene in particular I want to highlight, which is Max's introduction. Let's just that as much as this movie threw me, I wasn't expecting to hear Leonard Nimoy rasp out the "Final Frontier" speech as presented in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. What's confusing about this scene is that Max is in a chatroom on his computer, talking to someone named "Kirk"! These circumstances don't really justify themselves outside of establishing that Max, a mathematician, is nerdy, which is funny because Max has a relatively small role in the film.

But of course I'm ignoring the main thing I liked about Plaga Zombie: more than any other Kids Goofing Off movie I've seen so far, it reminded me of the movies I used to make with my friends. All those silly half-comedies about ninjas and bigfoot and Sausage Kings...those were the days. We knew what sort of movies we wanted to make ours like, but it was impossible to ignore putting in our own idiosyncracies as well. And in the case of the movies of my past, this meant a lot of dumb inside jokes which were nonetheless pretty hilarious at the time. But the makers of Plaga Zombie, as I've said, took a very professional approach to their work, and consequently their output is more soberingly fluid than anything I put together.

The production company responsible for Plaga Zombie, Farsa Producciones, has been generous enough to put the movie and its two sequels up on YouTube, so you have no excuse to miss this. I will probably never recommend a zombie comedy ever again, so this is a pretty big deal!

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The Raiders of Atlantis (1983), by Ruggero Deodato

Huh. I never thought I'd actually grow to love a Ruggero Deodato film. My experience with Deodato has primarily been the second-hand experience of knowing people who have actually sat themselves down and watched Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. To be honest, I'm sure I myself will find the strength to watch Cannibal Holocaust at some point, since I made it through Cannibal Ferox and all--I'm not overly concerned with the human violence in Cannibal Holocaust, even if I know I have my limits. What worries me more about Holocaust and Deodato in general is the animal cruelty that would become a hallmark of the Amazon Cannibal subgenre...I keep my movies in the realm of fiction. If you start breaking out into reality with some of your stunts, then eyebrows are going to be raised. I made the mistake of following the trails of breadcrumbs that fanned out from the animal slaughter depicted in Cannibal Holocaust and found that Deodato was actually still one of the lighter of the Italian exploitation filmmakers--at least he didn't actually participate in human trafficking, or show real executions, like his comrade Franco Prosperi. Even so I wasn't prepared to forgive Deodato anytime soon. Today's movie, The Raiders of Atlantis, presents to me a paradox I've also run into with Prosperi, which is that I have actually found one of his movies that I like. (In Prosperi's case, I was a fan of his weird killer creatures movie Wild Beasts before I found out about some of his doings.) The Raiders of Atlantis is an unexpectedly entertaining action film, wildly disconnected and yet bizarrely sober all at once. Kinda makes you forget that the guy who made it was a colossal A-hole.

The year is 1994, in Miami Florida a bunch of mercenaries are killing dudes. They include Mike Ross and a man whose name is Mohamed but whom everyone insists on calling Washington. After they are done killing dudes and getting paid for it, we cut to a scientist, Kathy, who has been called from her Central American archaeological work to examine a 12,000 year old tablet of unknown origin. Suddenly, in the wake of the crash of a Russian nuclear submarine, Atlantis rises from the ocean, and as it does so, a group of biker punks, led by a guy in a really cool semi-transparent skull mask, begin killing people. They shoot a housewife in the neck with an arrow and dispose of her husband shortly thereafter. You may not believe it (I sure didn't), but this all comes together and leads to the bulk of the film's content, wherein the mercenaries and scientists battle the punks with a seemingly-endless supply of Molotov cocktails, which they keep kissing before throwing. In the end, however, none of it makes sense, least of all the bullshit explanation that a radiation leak on the Russian sub somehow caused Atlantis to rise from the ocean.

Where do I start? Maybe at the beginning...these opening credits really caught me off-guard. The theme that plays over these credits was jarringly similar to the theme from Yor, Hunter from the Future. It turns out this is due to the simple fact that both songs are done by the Oliver Onions, a band which along with Goblin ended up scoring a lot of European exploitation through the '70s and '80s. It doesn't help that the theme the Spoony One plays on his old Rebuary videos is the theme from The Raiders of Atlantis, even as he's showing footage from Yor, which is probably where I got confused. In any case, I allowed myself to believe for the first ten minutes of this film that Deodato had just stolen the theme from Yor and cut out all the parts that talk about the titular Yor. That would have been the funniest thing since Bruno Mattei stole the Dawn of the Dead theme for Hell of the Living Dead.

Actually, this movie's dialogue feels like Mattei's...it has that Claudio Fragasso fragrance to it. And I may in fact be selling Raiders of Atlantis a little short, as the dialogue occasionally exceeds the lunacy of the Mattei/Fragasso combo. Take for example this exchange between Mike and Kathy:

Mike: "You gotta be like Popeye. Eat your spinach."

Kathy: "I like spinach too!"

Mike: "Well, tell you what. When we're back ashore, and this is all over...I'll take you out to a spinach dinner."

...I'm sorry, what?

That's some Carlos Tobalina shit right there. A spinach dinner? Is spinach by itself really a meal? Is there a restaurant that would comply with a request for just spinach? Is that already an option on their menu? Are they going to be eaten their spinach raw or cooked? If the former, are they at least going to put dressing and croutons on their spinach, or does their love of spinach eclipse any culinary value they could derive from such? As remarkable as this exchange is...it comes back at the ending. This was considered by the screenwriter to be a big moment in the relationship of these characters.

This isn't even disjointed; this is all the joints taken out of the bones, and reassembled into something weird and spider-y. Individual moments, save for the ludicrous dialogue, work by themselves, but this film in no way becomes a gestalt. There is no unification between the punk plot, the Atlantis plot, and the mercenary plot, save for the fact that they are all in this movie. And Deodato definitively succeeds at distracting us from how these plots in no way overlap by smothering us with endless awesome action sequences, ablaze with tripwire decapitations and napalm.

Finally...returning somewhat to the character of Mohamed. It's true that only Italian exploitation directors could make a movie this illogical, but it also took an Italian studio to make an action movie where the hero, or one of the big heroes, is a black Muslim who lives all the way to the end. Seriously, I've yet to see such a thing outside out of, well, the film markets of the Islamic world, and so for this and for everything else he does in the movie, Mohamed is now one of my favorite action movie heroes ever. Let him be one of yours, too!

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The Rider of the Skulls (1965), by Alfredo Salazar

This is not a B-Western, I swear! A B-Western, as far as I know, is usually defined as being a Western made between the '20s and '50s which was not an A-feature. And, usually, the B-Western proper is bred only in the United States. The Western market changed after the 1950s to a more Italian focus, but The Rider of the Skulls is a Mexican production. And, like a lot of horror films made in Mexico over the last hundred years (to say nothing of the other movies written and directed by Alfredo Salazar), Rider of the Skulls is stunningly offbeat, being probably one of the weirdest Weird Westerns out there.

A werewolf prowls the Mexican countryside, under the control of a witch. He wears a flannel shirt, as is required by all Mexican werewolves, and his mask is pretty goddamn amazing. Eventually, one of the families subjected to the horror of the werewolf--including Don Luis and his wife, plus their son Perico and cowardly butler Cleofas--encounter the Rider of the Skulls, a masked gunfighter whose parents were killed by bandits. He patrols Mexico in search of supernatural evils to dispatch, such as the witch and the werewolf. The witch reveals to the Rider that the werewolf is Don Luis, after she shows off her abilities to summon a zombie, and the Rider is forced to kill him. (If you think it's a spoiler that I reveal that werewolf's identity, well...let's just say that if you want to hide the fact that your freshly introduced character is a werewolf, don't have their wife introduce them by saying that they recently became mysteriously ornery.) He adopts the now-orphaned Perico, as Don Luis killed his wife whilst werewolfing, and he takes on Cleofas as his comic relief sidekick.

The movie doesn't end with the death of the werewolf. In fact, we're just getting started...because now our heroic trio has to take down a vampire! This vampire has an even more amazing mask, and transforms into the fakest movie bat of all time--faker, even, than The Devil Bat. He seeks a girl named Maria to be his companion, and he nearly succeeds in turning her into another of the undead before he too is dispatched by the Rider.

But even that isn't the end of the movie, as the Rider, Perico, and Cleofas discover in the next town they ride up on is haunted by the goddamn Headless Horseman! (Little south of Tarrytown, isn't it?) And best of all, the Headless Horseman's animate severed head is represented by the most amazing mask we've seen so far. Said head turns up in the hands of a woman, whom it beseeches, "Please return me to my body." Upon having his noggin restored, however, the Horseman makes the mistake of cursing out God Himself...not even his robed skeleton minions are that dumb. And you'd better believe that the fury of the Lord comes through the blade of the Rider of the Skulls!

Anthology films are usually dangerous territory, as a lot of critics will tell you. For some reason there's a propensity for anthologies to always have that one segment that fucks up really, really badly, and as such we critical folk walk into them with trepidation. But I dunno...it seems like I've had a lot of really good luck with anthology films recently. Night Train to Terror was a glorious mess, Alien Zone was better than I expected, and my rewatch of Tales from the Quadead Zone went swimmingly. The Rider of the Skulls is definitely an anthology film, and that works tremendously to its benefit. An anthology film, I've realized, can theoretically pack more trashy goodness into its runtime by merit of having the chance to stack its craziness on top of itself. Just as you catch your breath from what came before, something new comes along and plows over you like a bullet train. This is yet another movie that I can almost review just by summarizing it.

If I had to say anything about it to give, y'know, an actual critical opinion, it would be that I really appreciate how it plays with the sort of stories it's dealing with. I can't say that I have ever seen a werewolf, for example, who transforms by first turning into a skeleton, and then being built back up into wolf form. Also, it's really nice to see a werewolf movie that remembers that there usually aren't thirty full moons in a row. The vampire meanwhile has that mask, which makes him look like a bat/human hybrid, but he also spends a lot of his screentime trying to defeat his foes by punching them. And as I mentioned before, the Headless Horseman has his two skeleton sidekicks, which is an interesting addition to the Headless Horseman story. It makes him feel more portentous, and I'm always happy to see skeletons in movies.

Probably cut from episodes of a kid's TV show, or maybe three other movies, The Rider of the Skulls is a three-headed nightmare of a Western, feeling like what would happen if the Blue Demon or El Santo started riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter. Deconstructing its own tropes, but only accidentally, the movie shows the power of low-budget Mexican horror, being one of the best examples of such that I've seen. Make it yours.

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The Book of Henry (2017), by Colin Trevorrow

Huh. That's weird. I'm being topical.

Yep, The Book of Henry is still in theaters as of this writing...though I'm sure it will be gone by the time this is finally posted. I don't go out to movie theaters very often Because Anxiety, but I've been trying to do so more often as I've gotten older and better paid. And I try to make it a mix: I'll go see Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 one week, and God's Not Dead 2 the next. I keep my ears open for particularly strange movies when I'm feeling in the "bad movie" mode, because as I've said before, if I had a chance to see Voodoo Man or The Face of Marble in theaters back in the day I'd jump at the chance. And there have been some weird movies to arise in the theaters in the last few years. Noah, Winter's Tale, and the complete filmography of Tyler Perry are all things which seem like they would have been theatrical impossibilities in my childhood, serving as inmates of Straight-to-Video Hell. But in time of strife, art becomes weird, and exploitation movies and other shit rises up to the surface. If there is a collective consciousness, it, too, gets the stress pukes, and unlike most vomit the colors we see in this strange distillation of the national soul are beautiful to behold. So let's take a look at Book of Henry's puke, and...well, I think perhaps I've already said too much. Focus on the beauty part of that metaphor, for this movie is something special, which I think will grow in power as history marches on.

We are told the tale of Henry Carpenter, who is a boy genius of boy geniuses. There seems to be no field beyond his grasp and by the age of eleven he has mastered most forms of science. He lives with his mother Susan (Naomi Watts) and brother Peter, and they neighbor the house where Henry's friend (crush?) Christina Sickleman and her stepfather, the local police commissioner, live. Henry eventually determines that Mr. Sickleman abuses Christina, probably sexually--at least physically enough as to cause characters to allude to (offscreen) ER visits. Henry uses all of the tools at his disposal to report the case, but due to both his age and adult apathy no one believes him. Then, he chances upon the decision to kill Mr. Sickleman. And using vast financial resources accumulated from years of brilliant stock market manipulation, he begins to put a plan into action to make the assassination happen--until it turns out he has brain cancer, which he learns from Dr. Lee Pace. (Dr. Bearded!Lee Pace at that, so there's a little somethin' fer the ladies.) Thus, he creates the Book of Henry: a notebook, accompanied by audio journals, which give detailed and explicit instructions to let Susan do the deed herself. Peter gives this to Susan after Henry inevitably does pass away. Susan has so much faith in her son that she believes his evidence, and begins to follow the journals to bring about the end of Mr. Sickleman. And this is when the movie becomes a thriller.

A year ago I worked as a bookseller at the local Barnes & Noble, which was a grueling torture fun exercise in the art of selling memberships and credit cards books. And during that time I became acquainted with what people really read. Contrary to what my professors told me, the vast majority of people don't really have a tendency to read good books, whether that's the "classics" or actual good books. There were a dozen names I would get time and time again which blur together in my mind, authors omnipresent but forgettable. John Sanford? James Patterson? Airport Lit Fic Deep Core-type stuff. Among these are the books marketed seemingly exclusively at White Women, with the caps meaning to make a distinction from white women in general; you probably know what I mean. These books were romance novels, some of them, but also their "more literary" lit fic cousins, which oftentimes are written by white men under pen names. This movie is a White Woman movie, I feel, or it began life as one. Everyone talks in sassy one-liners, even when it makes them seem like aliens. A child dies of cancer, in his mother's arms, no less. The main plot is about child abuse at the hands of a man who is every Movie Abusive Stepdad ever, and obviously comes across as such at first glance. These are things I view as flaws--lazy writing combined with the writing that everyone produces in the early days when they want us to know their characters are COOL. No real cool person talks this quirky, because real cool people are never happy, and quirky people never sound this confident in their aphorisms even if they actually spout them out loud. But I can forgive unrealistic writing, because everything else about the movie is marvelously unrealistic.

Consider that synopsis above. This starts out a movie about a Hollywood Quirky family centered around a boy genius. It then transforms into a rape-revenge-by-proxy movie, and then a four-tissue child-cancer weeper, before shifting back into rape-revenge, this time by double proxy! But the scripting stays consistent, so it never really stops being a quirky/weepy family movie either! Susan and Henry still banter at each even after the latter is reduced to handwriting and tape recordings. He's apparently so good at psychology that he predicted every single thing she would say and do in regards to his orders...include turning the wrong direction walking down the street. This is supposed to be cute, a reflection of how close mother and son were. But there is not a hair of an attempt to suspend disbelief--the movie started with disbelief smashed at the ground floor like a grand piano. That's why I cited Face of Marble up above. This suddenly seems to me like our era's equivalent of a Frankenstein/voodoo/vampire ghost dog mash-up.

For a movie that feels like every minute of its nearly two-hours (for better or worse), Book of Henry feels like it should be a lot longer. There are some curious loose ends left loose that shouldn't be. Namely, it's really only alluded to what Christina's abuse is. There are some hints here and there--Peter mentions that Henry's description of the abuse doesn't entirely make sense to him, suggesting that there are sexual components to it that his child mind doesn't understand (while also implying that Henry's knowledge includes sex ed...because of course it does). We never physically see the abuse, nor any marks from it, just Christina's depression, which could theoretically arise from other factors. It's odd to me that a movie that drops the f-bomb about three or four times, and features a character who is apparently an alcoholic, but they can't mention sexual abuse. The movie is already a bit beyond a PG-13 anyway, and I think they could have pushed it to an R without making it too overtly graphic. The youngest person I saw at my showing looked to be about my age, which is to say early twenties.

Like I said above, this movie is based on the tropes of Books for Middle-Class White People in many ways, and unfortunately that includes sexism. Let's just start by saying that Book of Henry features three female characters of note, and they are Susan, Christina, and Susan's friend Sheila. I will start with Sheila, as she has much less screentime and plot significance. Sheila is Susan's work buddy at the diner she hosts at, as well as her drinking buddy and, based on how the script carries things, maybe her fuck buddy? Sheila spends much of her screentime drunk and/or hungover, and Henry condemns her as an alcoholic, because he's Hollywood Child Precocious and that means he's kind of a heartless little shit--rather what I'd imagine Jude from Alien Lover was like at eleven. He also basically calls her ugly. They make up in the end, but it seems a little tacked on and honestly you just feel a little bad for her.

Significantly more problematic is the character of Susan, who displays an uncomfortable amount of dependence on her son. He does her taxes, secures the family nest egg, and honestly makes most of her decisions. It's so bad she even refuses to sign his consent forms when he's hospitalized for a seizure without consulting him first. She is effectively the child and he is effectively the parent, and they have an explicit conversation in his last days about how she doesn't even know how to be a mother to Peter without Henry's guidance. I can understand letting one be consumed with love for one's son and being proud of their considerable intelligence, especially when it makes one's life much easier, but this is unnatural, which is not a word I use very often. There's a different type of movie waiting in the wings with this sort of dynamic, with a much more sinister and manipulative Henry, perhaps one who caused his mother's dependence on him...but I kid. It just seems weird that a grown woman is viewed in the movie's eyes as being inferior to an eleven-year-old boy.

And then there is Christina. I'd consider her one of the pivotal characters, considering, y'know, she's at the heart of the film's conflict. And also she's an abuse victim. But she gets nothing in this movie. She gets a few murmurs, and one significant conversation, but aside from that we know she is...nice? Henry thought so, at any rate. Oh, she's also a ballerina, and she tips off the school principal that she's being abused because she looks sad while dancing. Christina is never anything more than a plot prop, a living Macguffin, a damsel in distress for whom we are supposed to feel glurgy sadness. Combine this with the vagueness of the abuse, and there's little reason for us to be invested. To give a female character a submissive and weak personality like Susan is one thing--it's another entirely for one of the female leads to have no personality whatsoever. That's what I've seen crop up in those White Woman books which this movie feels so akin to; casual, dismissive, unaware, and glamorized sexism. Fuck you, 21st Century literary fiction. You're usually neither progressive nor authentic.

Now that's a lot of flaws, and I was pretty harsh in presenting them. I don't hate this movie, though--I enjoyed it a ton. The person I saw this with said immediately that the individual scenes all usually work, clunky dialogue and all, even if they add up to something very bizarre holistically. I think that fact is actually what makes the movie. It's like a string of mini-movies that lead towards one big movie that makes relatively little sense. It's not like something like, say, Time of the Apes, which wears its status as a hyper-compressed TV series on its sleeve. And it's not like Bloody Wednesday, where it's a bunch of increasingly nonsensical additions that add up to something that feels like a dream. This movie feels like it couldn't possibly have enough material for several TV episodes and it's generally grounded in reality. Until you think about it.

All I know is that I'm happy I got to see this in theaters. For all the crap I gave the dialogue, there are some pretty clever lines in here, if not some genius ones; and I was fond of the tiny Naomi Watts/Lee Pace romance that cropped up here and there, plus the sexual tension between Susan and Sheila. And the acting is awesome all throughout, even from and even especially from the kids. You'll laugh at this movie like you do with "bad" movies, but it won't be quite the same. I wish I knew what the precise feeling was, but I'll fun finding out when it hits home video. Join me, won't you?

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Image Source: IMP Awards

Bloody Wednesday (1987), by Mark G. Gilhuis

You'll pray for Thursday!

This is a movie which--I think--tries to tackle some serious issues and then swiftly decides it cares about other things. Bloody Wednesday was based in part on the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre, perpetrated by an anti-government survivalist named James Huberty. I think director Mark G. Gilhuis wanted to raise some questions about the nature of mental illness, both how it can make people do horrible things but also expose how horrible loved ones can be once they find out the sufferers have it. Instead, we got a stupefying dark comic movie about public nudity and talking teddy bears.

Harry Curtis is an auto mechanic who loses his job for disassembling a rich client's car, and then forgetting how to put it back together. This incident, coupled with his sudden nude appearance at a church service, are enough to get him institutionalized. Because this is a horror movie, it doesn't take long before the hospital overcrowds and they have to evict some of the patients. Harry is discharged against the head doctor's better judgment, and Harry's brother Ben somehow manages to put Harry up in an old abandoned hotel, where his only company is his stuffed bear Teddy. Who talks. He talks in this high-pitched squeaky dub which will sell you on this movie at once. Harry has to face the perils of the hotel, like punks who keep breaking in to murder him, and ghosts who reenact their suicides. Eventually, he decides to reintegrate with the outside world, and when that doesn't work, he decides to bring a rifle into the local cafe.

First of all, it needs to be said that I really wish I knew how coincidental the resemblances between Bloody Wednesday and The Shining are. Most things in Bloody Wednesday are hazily defined, and so its commonalities with that more famous film are tenuous--less like plagiarism, and more like Gilhuis watched The Shining late one night while high and had a nightmare about it. That may simply be Gilhuis succeeding in hiding his plagiarism, but I don't know--I guess the fact that there are relatively few dreamy haunted hotel films is probably a factor. This movie is like a dream, and it's up there now with the other movies I call "Hotel California Movies," about hotels or missions or both that have particularly weird hauntings. The other notable entry in this sub-genre is 1974's Moonchild (and there's also the webcomic Nan Quest).

Bloody Wednesday is a movie that substitutes characterization and sentiment for mugging and pants-pissing. It never really tries to be artistic, and doesn't really succeed at being such accidentally. But it's captivating, and that's usually better than being artistic. There's always something unexpected happening onscreen, like Gretta and The Telephone Book; never does it let up. The plot meanders where it pleases, which may be a turn-off for you if you're lame. Events keep piling up until we are forced to confront the subplot wherein Harry is looking for the lost wealth of one of the hotel's suicide ghosts...the lost wealth of a man named Mr. Burns. Mr. Burns even looks like his more famous name-sharer, and this movie hit home video just a year before The Simpsons' Mr. Burns appeared. Did Matt Groening see this movie late one night? Was the curse carried even further...?

The movie does touch on some serious topics. Ableism against the mentally ill, both systemic and individual. Homelessness among the mentally ill. Emotional and sexual abuse of men by women. The ease of obtaining guns in the United States. The inefficiency and apathy of the police. And it does present these topics with complexity. We end up sympathizing with Harry, after all, even though we're warned at the beginning that the movie ends with him shooting a bunch of people. The massacre lasts for a long time and it is pretty darn violent, to say nothing of the fact that the event it was based off of was even more traumatic. All sympathy for him vanishes at that point. It's a pretty cynical ending--we see a man tortured by violence turn into the very thing which tormented him. Is it right that he was harassed and abused for his illness? No. Is it right that he took his frustration and fear out on others? No.

So, yeah, this movie is pretty cynical...except it also isn't. The moments like Harry walking naked through church, or the close-ups of the outline of his peen as a snake crawls up his leg, and hell, even some of the violence at the end, are all pretty hilarious, if occasionally harrowing. This is a weird shot-on-video non-slasher which feels as scuzzy and cheap as some of its other SOV brethren like 555 and Sledgehammer. And it is way more stupefying than many of its video horror cousins, being something like The Shining squared. Or cubed. Everything is a non sequitur; scenes don't rationally follow each other, and it's never made clear what is and isn't a hallucination. For example, are there paranormal events at the hotel? Or are they just products of Harry's delusions? Is this a Jack Torrance-type scenario, where the ghosts are making an extant problem worse?

There are some other questions, too, like why a closed hotel still has electricity and running water, and why the police have no problem with Harry living there. These are more minor mysteries, having more rational answers, but that they aren't answered onscreen on in dialogue adds to the dreaminess of the whole affair. It's delicious.

Bloody Wednesday is a greatly entertaining piece of violence squashed to trash, made powerless by the power of extremely cheap cinema. Imagination runs wild, and divorces the finished product from reality. It's always nice to see that sort of severance enacted, even when the source material isn't something gruesome. Maybe you'll want Thursday to wait awhile anyway.

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Cruel Ghost Legend (1968), by Kasuo Haze

So outside of Shogun Assassin, and the Godzilla series, we haven't done any Japanese movies on here! Let's change that. J-horror is pretty awesome--my friends awoke me to the coolness of the Ju-On series in college, and around the same time news was breaking of the re-discovery of this movie, which was formerly believed lost. Even then I was wary of lost films retaining any degree of entertainment--the loss of a lot of these movies would not be any big blow to film. But Cruel Ghost Legend is a movie that found its way back from oblivion that actually still has a solid kick to it. Shocking beyond what Western audiences could stand at the time, the movie stands as a potent piece of Japanese ghost horror with enough sleaze to satisfy your average trash fan several times over.

A samurai and his wife are deep in debt to a blind acupuncturist named Sojun, who may also be the samurai's father. They enter a deal where Sojun may have his way with the samurai's wife in exchange for crossing off the interest on the debt--never mind that this would be a huge dishonor for her. However, this is a ruse, and as he goes in to rape her, the samurai brutally slashes him to death. As he and his son Shinichiro throw the dying victim into the river, but as he sinks below the cloud of black blood, he spits a curse out at the couple. We slowly learn more of the samurai's lifestyle after his murder of Sojun; he has a mistress, whom he has gotten pregnant, and he has another son named Shinzo from a restaurant girl. Eventually the ghost of Sojun arrives, and tricks the samurai into killing his wife before seemingly killing him.

But this isn't the end. Years later Shinichiro has become a bandit and multiple murderer. We follow him as he continues his spree of deception, seduction, murder, and thievery, until at last his sins catch up with him when he tries to kill and rob his former sensei, an incestuous lech who fakes quadriplegia. After a rooftop showdown with the police, Shinichiro is captured and sentenced to his final fate. We then go even further into the future to follow the life of Shinzo, who is also a criminal. With the aid of his partner-in-crime/lover Ohisa he tries to seduce a wealthy women to rob her in her sleep, but she catches him and forces him to become her lover by insinuating he raped her. Shortly thereafter her face is horribly disfigured, but he is still trapped with her. These plot threads finally weave themselves together in a fucked-up ending that would make Harry Stephen Keeler proud.

With comparatively few sets, actors, and effects, Cruel Ghost Legend attempts to tell a time-spanning story across two generations that is ultimately a fable of bleakness. Not only is the extent of Sojun's curse particularly chilling, but the reasoning behind it makes it all worse: it's a curse cast in revenge, but it's not even revenge we can root for, since the person trying to avenge themselves is an usurer with ambitions of rape! I can't think of a single good thing that happens to anybody in this movie, so if you go in expecting even a hint of optimism you'll be let down. But if you're like me, and you're a fan of Bad Things Getting Worse...

Unlike a lot of movies that go for relentless negativity, Cruel Ghost Legend still makes some choices that good movies make. Visually, it's very impressive, with some of the same excellent lighting decisions as the spooky parts of Face of the Screaming Werewolf, and some comparably creepy makeup. There's a lot of blood, as well, and as we learned with The Flesh Eaters, gore always looks better in black in white. The movie does occasionally step into color, particularly during select scenes where everything becomes psychedelic purple. These are always used to highlight flashbacks to the circumstances that led into the curse. On an auditory level the film also delivers, using a variety of internal monologues to show just how big of scumbags our characters are, and a high screeching soundtrack that is automatic code for pants-shitting terror. The film haunts you as a result of all these different factors piling up on each other.

I haven't seen enough J-horror in my life, but I write this review with the hopes that some of you out there will watch Cruel Ghost Legend for yourselves and recommend similar things to me. Leave a comment below and I'll love you for life.

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