Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite films of all time.  I loved the original which I saw when it first came out in 1978.  The film was supposed to be no one under 17 admitted period, but my mom took me and at 14 I was hooked on Romero’s film.  A few years later the WV Library Commission purchased a 16mm copy for their film library.  I checked it out and was surprised to find a lot of footage that I hadn’t seen before.  I liked this version much better than the original and I spent a huge amount of time trying to track down a copy on VHS.  When the movie came out on DVD, it was released in two versions by Anchor Bay.  I kept trying to figure out which version was the longer one before I bought a copy.  I was also disappointed that the disc was a “flipper” where half the movie is one side of the disc and the rest is on the other side of the disc.  While I debated which one to buy, both discs went out of print.  I eventually bought a couple German edition DVDs before Anchor Bay released the Divimax edition.  They then followed that up with a wonderful box set that contained three different versions of the film.  I purchased both of those.  I also picked up a copy of the original Anchor Bay edition and over the holidays I ordered yet another edition.  That means I have 6 copies of the original Dawn of the Dead (assuming we count the box set as 1 instead of 3).

In 2004 Universal released a remake of Dawn of the Dead.  I missed it on its initial run, but as luck would have it, I was working in Beckley and the film was playing at the $1 theater.  I paid for my ticket and was very impressed.  When the DVD came out, I bought the Widescreen Unrated Director’s Cut with the cardboard slipcover.  This was followed by the R rated version in Full Screen from Wills.  Then I went looking on eBay.  I got the region 2 edition from England, the limited 2 disc version that was released with a bonus disc when the DVD was first released in some locations, and several editions that may be official Asian releases, but may be bootlegs.  I especially love one version I got that lists the rating as PG-13.  It’s almost as good as the copy of American Pie 2 that I got where the box makes the movie sound like a political uprising instead of a teen sex comedy.  The last copy of Dawn of the Dead (2004) I added to my collection was one in Spanish that I found at Big Lots for $3.  That brings my total copies of the remake to 8.

As much as I love the original, I think I love the remake equally well.  I love the cast.  I especially love the cameos by some of the original guys from Dawn; Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Tom Savini.  Zack Snyder pulled off a rare feat by making such a wonderful film.  When I heard that he was doing Watchmen, I felt sure he would do the movie proud.  I was not let down there either.

Dawn of the Dead is just as exciting watching it for the fourth or fifth time as it was the very first time.  I have to give it 4 stars.  As further proof of my fan love for this movie in both of its incarnations, after my wife and I had been married for about a year and a half, I got a vacation.  We decided to go to Monroeville, PA so that I could visit the Dawn of the Dead shopping mall.  The wife was 7 months pregnant.  I had a cold.  We had no map, but had gotten vague directions from a map that was on the side of a trashcan at her parents’ house.  We were driving a white car in fog that was so thick that truckers were pulling over.  We stopping at a rest area right inside Pennsylvania, and I found a better map.  A short time later we saw the sign “Now entering Monroeville”.  The wife looked at me and asked, “Now, do you think you’ll be able to find the shopping mall?”  No sooner had the words left her mouth than a sign appeared exclaiming, “Entrance Monroeville Shopping Mall”.  I looked back at her and said, “Yeah, I think I can handle it.”

Eddie Murphy Delirious

I remember watching this performance when it first hit HBO back in 1983.  I hadn’t been a big fan of Eddie’s from SNL, but I loved him in 48 Hours.  I thought he was hilarious and couldn’t wait to see his stand up act.  My friends and I watched and rewatched that special a ton of times, laughing at it every single time.  I hadn’t seen the performance for close to 25 years when I decided to pop it in the DVD player.  My how times have changed.

Eddie Murphy’s act is still hilarious.  This is a great stand up performance.  What hit me over the head like a sledgehammer was when he comes out and starts by saying that “faggots aren’t allowed to look at my ass”.  I can’t think of a major comedian today that would start off his act with such a statement.  And even when comedians do dip into the gay humor act, they hardly ever use the term faggot any longer.  To hear this roll so freely off the tongue of Dr. Doolittle was just astounding.  It would be like hearing Tim Allen or Jeff Foxworthy come out and start dropping the N word.  Ask Michael Richards how that worked out. 

Murphy delivers a lot of material in the 70+ minute show.  He talks about imagining Mr. T and The Honeymooners as gay men.  He talks about chasing the ice cream truck down to buy ice cream as a kid.  He discusses his mother’s ability to discipline with a flying shoe.  He also goes into great detail about the family cookout.  All of these bits inspire plenty of laughs. 

Another thing that struck me as interesting while watching the show now, was that since Chappelle’s Show, we actually know who his brother Charlie Murphy is.  When Eddie talks about Charlie at the cookout, we know who Charlie is.  Unfortunately for Charlie when Eddie talks about the two of them playing in the bathtub, Eddie playing with his G.I. Joe and Charlie playing with a brown shark made of fecal matter, well, we know who Charlie is there too unfortunately for Charlie.

Delirious holds up surprisingly well other than being a slap to the political correctness of today.  The language is raunchy, as you might expect, but the jokes are funny, and that’s all that matters in my book.  Delirious gets a 10 on the Night Flight scale.

Halloween (1978)

When Halloween first came out, I remember seeing the ads in the newspaper.  Unfortunately it was playing at The State theater and my mom wouldn’t drive there after dark, and The State never had matinees.  I think the first time I saw Halloween was on HBO.  I loved it.  It was unlike any horror movie I had ever seen at that time.  It was wonderfully scary with great performances and fantastic direction.  The music was also really cool.  Several years later I got my first VHS recorder and Halloween was one of the first movies I taped on television.  The TV version was missing the nudity, some of the language, and I think the violence was toned down some as well, but it featured at least two additional scenes as I recall. 

I purchased Halloween on VHS and watched it several times.  After I started the conversion to DVD, I found a copy at Wills and purchased it as well.  I never sat down and watched it until the other night.  I was certain that the DVD I had contained the expanded edition of Halloween with the additional scenes, but I was wrong.  This was the THX approved version, but it did not have the additional scenes.  Guess I need to start watching the pawn shops or maybe I’ll just wait and get the Blu-ray.  A couple of scenes seemed to have been adjusted in this cut as well.  The opening scene with Michael killing his sister seems to have had the eye holes in the mask that Michael is wearing shrunk down.  I seem to recall a much wider view of the sister and the murder.  A similar image editing appears to have happened in the scene with P.J. Soles lowering the sheet and appearing topless.  The bottom of the frame now appears to be higher blocking the view of her naked breasts.  I seem to recall both of these tricks being used for the television airing of the film, but I really thought we were given a completely topless shot of Ms. Soles’ breasts when the movie played on HBO and VHS.

What can you say about Halloween that hasn’t already been said?  The film is a masterpiece and definitely a quintessential horror film.  I don’t think there was a single red-blooded teen-age boy that wasn’t in deep lust with P.J. Soles, and most were also pretty taken with the more innocent Laurie Strode as played by Jamie Lee Curtis.  It was the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis that made me sit through Grandview U.S.A.

I had seen John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 on HBO and really enjoyed it.  At the time I didn’t know he was the director behind Halloween, but I learned quickly, and he became one of my favorite directors.  I loved Escape From New York and The Thing, although Christine left me a little disappointed. 

Halloween told the story of an escaped killer that returns to his hometown to murder once again.  It was so successful that a string of sequels were made over the years.  Only Halloween III dared to depart from the exploits of Michael Myers.  It pretty much bombed at the box office, but I actually enjoyed it.  In fact it was much more entertaining than Halloween 2 in my opinion.

Halloween is a true classic and I can’t help but give it 4 stars.

Martin (1977)

It’s amazing to me how obsessed I used to be able to get about a subject when I was younger.  A perfect example is George Romero.  I loved Dawn of the Dead.  For years it was my all-time favorite film and to prove my love of the film, I bought everything related to it or Romero that I could find.  I bought the t-shirt, the soundtrack album, the poster book, and both the hardcover and softcover edition of the book.  I also joined the George Romero fan club which was run by a guy named Mike Housel in New Jersey if my memory serves me correctly.  In addition to a little wallet sized membership card, I also got a subscription to the fanzine which I believe was called Zombie.  The fanzine was a simple black and white photocopied labor of love, but it helped to inform me of Romero’s earlier films and upcoming films.  One of the films I read about was Martin.

Martin was an earlier Romero film starring John Amplas as a young man who may or may not be a vampire.  There were two or three pictures from Martin that I remember seeing, but I never got the chance to actually see the movie.  Keep in mind this was several years before home video took off.  I had been fortunate enough to catch Night of the Living Dead during a movie night the Dunbar Public Library hosted, but Martin, Jack’s Wife, The Crazies, and There’s Always Vanilla never turned up anywhere.  I managed to find a copy of the book (from Saint Martin’s Press if memory serves), but no screening of the film.  Eventually several years later I did get a copy of Martin on VHS.  I remember sitting down with it and watching it, but I don’t really recall much more about the film.  It just didn’t leave an impression on me. 

When I began switching my movie collection from VHS to DVD, I purchased Knightriders.  I planned on purchasing Dawn of the Dead, but it went out of print and became impossible to find for the longest time unless you were willing to pay $60 or more.  I also managed to find and pick up a DVD copy of Martin.  I put it in my collection, but had no overwhelming urge to sit down with it again right away.  I finally decided that I needed to give Martin a second look, and this seemed a good enough tome to do that.

I must say, I’m glad I watched it again.  This time I got it.  The movie really entertained me.  I’m not sure why I didn’t get it during my first viewing in the late 80s.  I was definitely more of a Romero cultist back then than I am today.  I still like and admire the man, but I didn’t go looking for the nearest theater showing Diary of the Dead or Survival of the Dead when they were released.  I used to do things like that in the 80s.  I one time drove around 300 miles round trip to see the John Cusack film Better Off Dead.  Friends and I drove about 90 miles to see Deathtrap.  This seemed perfectly normal back then.  But back to Romero, I would have been much more likely to go nuts for anything Romero back in the late 80s, so why didn’t Martin get me more excited?

The most likely reason would be my expectations.  Martin is horror film, but it is also a wonderful character study of this young man and his family.  Perhaps I was looking for more blood and gore than the film offered.  Despite being a film about a blood drinker, there are really very few scenes involving blood.  Martin kills a couple of people in the film, but that’s about it.  Most of the film concerns his interactions with his family, a radio talk show host, and a lonely older woman who takes Martin as her lover.  All of these relationships are fascinating and beautifully written, but when I watched Martin the first time, I was expecting a modern vampire film.  The vampire aspect of Martin is handled in a manner similar to the way films like Mask and My Left Foot handle their character’s disabilities.  Yes, these people have something that makes them different, but that is not as important as how they live their lives because of it. 

I really enjoyed Martin this time.  It made such a low impression on me last time that I found scenes in the film that I had absolutely no recollection of.  There is a police chase that ends in a gang shoot out featuring Romero regulars the Buba brothers, Tony and Pasquale.  I didn’t remember any of that scene.  There was also a sequence where Martin stalks a woman and waits until her husband is going to be out for the night.  He breaks in to her home with the intention of drinking her blood and killing her while she is there alone.  The only problem is that she is not alone.  She is having an affair and Martin bursts into her bedroom to find her completely naked with a different man.  Romero does an amazing job of setting up three different lines of fear in this scene.  The woman is afraid, but because she is involved in an adulterous relationship, she can’t call the police without exposing her secret and ruining her marriage.  The man is afraid initially because he thinks Martin is the husband and then once he realizes that he is an intruder and Martin stabs him with one of his drugged hypodermic needles, his fear becomes a fear for his life.  What is in the needle?  Who is the kid wielding the needle?  The third line of  fear is Martin’s own fear.  He needs the blood to survive, and he has grown cocky about his ability to plan and execute the acts required to get the blood.  The presence of another unexpected presence puts his plans at risk.  He could get caught.  He could get hurt by the other man.  He has to stop them.  He has to feed.  And he has to get away without a trace.  This is truly an amazing heart pounding sequence.  I had no recollection of it from my first viewing, but the images and the emotions are so powerful, that I find it hard to believe I will forget it any time soon after this viewing.  The image of the completely naked and frantic wife screaming that she doesn’t know who the attacker is, and that she can’t call for help because the lover isn’t supposed to be there, all the while hoping that her lover can defend her or that the intruder will go away is one of the best representations of despair I can recall in a film.  What makes the scene even more a masterpiece in my opinion, is what Romero doesn’t tell us about the aftermath of the scene, but allows our minds to contemplate.  Martin spares the woman, but kills the lover.  He then cleans up the house as if the attack never happened.  He places the woman in her bed and stages the man’s death outside in a wooded area to look like an accident.  What will happen when the woman wakes up?  Will she assume it was a nightmare?  When the man’s body is found, will she tell what happened that night and destroy her marriage, or will she go to sleep every night carrying that secret and always wondering if the intruder will return?  Romero doesn’t come out and show the woman dealing with these questions, but he layers them into the minds of the viewer who is willing to truly immerse themself into the thoughts of the character.

Martin is a hidden horror masterpiece.  It needs to be rediscovered by today’s vampire fans.  Martin may not glitter, but the film certainly shines.  I give Martin 3 stars.  Be sure and look for cameos by a very young George Romero and Tom Savini.

Masters Of Horror: Dream Cruise

I enjoyed the first season of Masters of Horror, but I lost a lot of respect for Showtime when they refused to air Takashi Miike’s contribution, Imprint.  I also wasn’t thrilled that they chose to release each episode on an individual DVD release before doing a season box set.  I watched all of season one when it aired, but after the Miike incident, I ended up not as thrilled and ended up missing most of season two.  Dream Cruise was one of the season two episodes I did not get around to watching.  Coincidentally, it was also from a Japanese director and it was also the 13th episode of the season.

I had picked up the DVD at one of the pawn shops and while looking for a short film, but one that was more appropriate for the Halloween season, I decided to pop in Dream Cruise.  I figured it was around an hour long.  In fact the cover even stated that it was only 60 minutes long.  I popped it in and began to watch. 

The plot was similar to a lot of the recent J-Horror releases that have made it to America in that it deals with ghosts and restless spirits haunting people and places.  In this case a young man is haunted by visions of his younger brother, who he watched drown after failing to save him during a boating accident.  The man has never ventured back out on the water since that time, but now he is forced by a client to conduct a meeting with him out on the sea.  Further complicating matters is the fact that the client, Eiji (Ryo Ishibashi) insists on bringing along his wife Yuri (Yoshino Kimura) who has been having an affair with the young man, Jack (Daniel Gillies).  Yuri thinks Eiji is wise to their affair, and she also confides to Jack that Eiji’s first wife mysteriously disappeared.  Yuri doesn’t think either of them may make it back alive.

The plot becomes fairly predictable from this point, with the boat mysteriously cutting out while at sea and a vengeful spirit seemingly behind the actions.  Jack is sure it is his brother’s ghost mad that he failed to save him.  The reality is of course that it is the ghost of the first wife who Eiji killed on this very boat in this very spot of water.  Andof course the ghost doesn’t just want to kill her murderer, she also wants to kill the woman who took him away from her.

Around 5o minutes in, I kept thinking that it was going to take longer than 5 or 10 minutes to wrap things up.  When the DVD player showed the run time past the hour and 5 minute mark, I really wondered what was going on.  As I later found out, there was a 60 minute version for Showtime and a 87 minute uncut version which was released on DVD.  I’m not sure what Showtime chose to cut, but it was interesting that there was a longer version.  It’s also interesting that all mention of Showtime has been scrubbed from the DVDs which were released by the Starz-owned Anchor Bay.

Dream Cruise isn’t the best of the series, but it is far from the worst as well.  I give it a 2 1/4 star rating.

Phantasm

I was in High School when Phantasm first came out.  I remember reading about it in Fangoria magazine and being excited to get to see it.  Unfortunately, I had to wait for the film to show up on HBO before I actually got the chance to see it, if I recall correctly.  When I did see it, I wasn’t a big fan.  It had some nice moments, but it just didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.  People were dead in one scene and then alive in the next and vice versa.  The movie plays out as almost a living nightmare dream sequence.  It is very effective at this, but that still doesn’t keep it from driving me crazy trying to put some sort of logic to it.

Since that first viewing, Phantasm has become a horror classic.  I love some of the elements that led to this status such as the silver orb, the Tall Man, and the gorgeous one sheet, but I could only guess that I must have missed something when I watched it the first time.  Maybe like The King of Hearts, I just needed to approach it with a more mature perspective.  MGM released a DVD of Phantasm that I purchased at Wills and watched around 2002.  I didn’t hate it, but I still wasn’t its biggest fan. 

A few years ago, Anchor Bay finally got the rights to release Phantasm and Phantasm III on DVD.  I am a huge fan of Anchor Bay and figured I would check out their releases eventually.  A few weeks ago I managed to run across the Anchor Bay edition of Phantasm at one of the pawn shops I frequent.  I bought it and added it to the collection.  The other night I was looking for a short film and with the approach of Halloween, I decided to take a look at Phantasm with fresh eyes. 

I’m still not sold on the movie.  I still like those iconic moments and the fact that I now recognize the actors from Kenny & Company makes me smile a little bit.  But I still keep clutching for a way to make the film make perfect sense.  Like The Beyond, I just have trouble dealing with a film that is such a dream-like narrative.

I can’t honestly say that the Anchor Bay edition is any better than the MGM edition because it has been 8 years since I watched the MGM version.  The Anchor Bay DVD does have several very informative featurettes, and it contains a commentary track that I probably should listen to as well.  I guess I’ll have to hold out on that until I finally manage to score one of the Phantasm box sets in the silver orb.  That would be a reason to check out the whole series and since I’ve seen the first one at least three times, it can’t hurt to listen to the commentary track the next time I pop it in.  Of course I believe that box set is limited to overseas distribution at the moment.  Thank God for eBay, I guess.

Phantasm is a classic.  The fact that it is still remembered and discussed 31 years later says something about it.  Never the less, for me it remains at best a 2 1/2 star movie, and actually after finding out that the lady in lavender used a body double for her topless scenes, I’m tempted to drop it to 2 stars.  Oh well at least I found out the scene with the music on the porch was real.

Masters Of Horror: We All Scream For Ice Cream

I was looking for some short DVDs and I figured since it is getting close to Halloween, horror movies would be a good thing to check out.  We All Scream For Ice Cream was another horror short from the second season of Masters of Horror.  This one was directed by Tom Holland who did Child’s Play and Fright Night.  I remember really enjoying Fright Night when I first saw it at the Keith Albee theater, so I had hopes for this one and for the most part it didn’t disappoint. 

The plot involves a childhood prank gone horribly wrong that resulted in the death of ice cream selling clown Buster played by William Forsythe.  When one of the kids moves back into town after growing up and having a family of his own, Buster shows back up and starts killing the ones responsible for his death using their own kids and a voodoo doll-like ice cream treat.  When the kids bite into the ice cream which is shaped into a human likeness, their parent melts into a big puddle of runny melted ice cream.

I enjoyed We All Scream For Ice Cream, and like Valerie on the Stairs it has some decent making of featurettes.  One deals with the making of the film while the other deals with how the make up effects were pulled off.  Both are worth watching.

I give We All Scream For Ice Cream a 9 on the Night Flight scale as well.  I remember reading that they wanted to concentrate more on monsters for season 2 of Masters of Horror, and with the demon in Valerie on the Stairs and the killer ice cream clown in We All Scream For Ice Cream, they have a couple of decent ones.  Both of these episodes were much better than some of the season one episodes.  I’m sorry they never produced a season 3 although Garris did work on Fear Itself for NBC and a Masters of Science Fiction series that I missed.

Masters Of Horror: Valerie On The Stairs

I was really excited when Showtime announced the first season of Masters of Horror.  13 short horror movies directed by the masters of the field.  I looked over the names; Tobe Hooper, John Landis, Joe Dante, Don Coscarelli, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Larry Cohen, Takashi Miike, Dario Argento, John McNaughton, and three names I didn’t recognize which included Lucky McKee, William Malone, and Mick Garris. I soon learned that Mick Garris was the executive producer for the series and was sort of the creator of the project.  He had also directed a couple Stephen King adaptations.  His episode didn’t actually hold any great anticipation for me, but it turned out to be a fairly decent one never the less.

For the second season of the show, I ended up missing every episode except for The Damned Thing and Family.  I kept my eyes open and figured I would grab the box sets at some point.  I never have gotten the box sets, but I have picked up a few of the single DVDs that Anchor Bay released.  What’s funny is that somewhere along the line Anchor Bay got bought out by Starz, so all the season 2 DVDs have every reference to Showtime removed as far as I can tell.

Valerie on the Stairs was Garris’ season 2 outing.  It was based on a story by Clive Barker that dealt with a house set up as a boarding home for unpublished writers to work on getting their projects written and published.  A new tenant moves in and starts hearing and seeing things.  He soon finds out that the building is haunted by a tortured young woman and the demon that loves her but keeps her enslaved.  Both of these beings were the products of failed writing done in the building with such a passion and intensity that it brought them to life.

I enjoyed the story and with Tony Todd playing the demon known as “The Beast”, I was extremely pleased.  Clare Grant as Valerie does a wonderful job in this short time to show us the frightened victim side of Valerie where she is roaming the halls naked and being sucked through walls by the demon, as well as the vindictive spirit side where she is calling in The Beast to destroy those writers that created the tortures she had to endure and that kept her imprisoned in the building by never finishing the novel.  Tyron Leitso does a decent job as the new writer who falls in love with Valerie.  The writing group that brought these dark characters to life consists of Christopher Lloyd, Suki Kaiser, and Jonathan Watton.

The disc includes a nice making of documentary which shows how they pulled off the amazing climax.  It also includes a featurette on jump shots which are designed solely to make the audience jump out of their seats.  Both are very well done and interview all the right people.  My only complaint disc wise was the huge amount of trailers on the front of the movie.  Normally I love trailers, but it seemed like we were getting trailers for all of the season 2 episodes as well as selected season one episodes.  I eventually hit the menu button and skipped past several of them.

I thought this was a pretty decent Masters of Horror, and much better than Garris’ season one episode.  I give it a 9 on the Night Flight scale.

The Legend Of Hillbilly John

This one, like my review of The Human Centipede, is a bonus.  The Legend of Hillbilly John has yet to be released to DVD and VHS copies are incredibly rare as well.  I was fortunate enough to run across a copy on eBay and snagged it for my viewing pleasure.  I have tried to get rid of most of my VHS tapes and replace them with DVDs.  Unfortunately there are some titles that just aren’t available on DVD.  Futureworld has never been released as a Region 1 DVD.  Mondo New York is unavailable as are several others.  This makes it extremely difficult to track down these movies.

I first saw The Legend of Hillbilly John back in 1974 with Keith Harris at the old Alban theater.  The advertisement featured Hillbilly John being attacked by Ugly Bird, a huge demonic flying bird.  We figured this was a monster movie.  We were wrong.  I’ll be honest, I hated this movie when Keith and I watched it.  Through the years I blanked it out of my mind except for the title.  The title served as a good barometer when I was checking out movie books.  I always look up two or three obscure films when I’m considering buying a book on movies.  If one or two of them are in the book, I figure the authors know their movies.  If none of them are there, I figure the book is more a compilation of big name movies, and not really what I’m looking for.

Having forgotten almost all of Hillbilly John, I was left with only three vague images from the film.  I remembered the battle with Ugly Bird.  Actually what I remembered was that it was way too short considering how it was built up by the advertising.  I also remembered a scene with a man walking into a witch’s house.  When he starts to walk in, she is a beautiful young maiden, but once locked inside she turns in to a much older and much less attractive woman.  I remember a tight shot of the man’s screaming face.  The third and final thing that I remembered was a scene that quite frankly, I thought I must have dreamed I saw because I couldn’t imagine it actually being in the movie.  It involved Hillbilly John pushing open a golden door (to heaven perhaps?) and entering.  The next scene was shot with a filter that made the whole image appear to be tinted in bright golden-yellow.  And what was that scene?  Hillbilly John walks into a field filled with black people picking cotton.  This film was made in 1974.  Even then this was an odd choice of images.  I remembered this and I seemed to recall the black people singing and walking off with Hillbilly John.  I was more or less right on all counts.

The Legend of Hillbilly John, I can safely say, was poorly marketed.  It is not a monster movie.  It is not a horror movie.  On video it was categorized as a family film, and that is closer to the mark.  The film is based on the book Who Fears The Devil? which contains stories from the Appalachians.  As Severn Darden explains at the start of the film, the people in the Appalachians fear Satan more than any monster, no matter what name he is called by.  Grandpa John (Denver Pyle) announces to the town that he plans to call out the devil and defy him under the full moon.  He has a plan to defeat the devil by using a guitar with pure silver strings.  He created the strings by melting down silver half dollars.  Grandpa, with the whole town watching on, begins to play and sing a song calling out the devil.  Unfortunately he soon finds out that U.S. coins are no longer made with pure silver, and as the image goes to one of tearing and melting film, Grandpa John is struck down by the devil.  Now Hillbilly John must take up the mission of his kin.  He starts by finding some real true silver for his strings and then he sets off to have the silver tested.  This trek with his dog, Honor Hound, leads him to cross paths with a man who yearns for gold and wealth, a witch who longs for revenge, and the Ugly Bird.

Taken as an Appalachian folk tale, The Legend of Hillbilly John is a pretty enjoyable movie.  I’m not sure this would have made the film any more enjoyable for a 10-year-old hoping for more monster battles unfortunately.  The film is filled with Hillbilly John stopping to play a bluegrass style folk song or two.  The music is actually pretty decent as well, in my opinion.

I would love to see someone do a decent DVD release of this film.  Anchor Bay or Shout Factory would probably do a great job.  Until that time I guess I’ll hold onto my VHS copy and hope the heads hold up on my VCR.  I give the film 2 1/2 stars.

The Beyond

I had heard lots of good things about The Beyond.  It was so scary.  It was so gory.  It was a horror masterpiece.  I had found a copy at Wills during one of my DVD buying sessions, but I hadn’t sat down to watch it.  Italian horror movies and I have a definite “love them or hate them” relationship.  I loved Demons and Demons 2.  I hated Burial Ground and The Gates of Hell.  One of my favorites has been Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, a.k.a. Zombi 2.  Valerie Austin and I caught Zombie on a double bill with The Hills Have Eyes at the Owens Drive-In while we were in high school.  I loved the zombie versus shark battle, the injury to the eye sequence, and the opening sequence on the boat.  With Fulci’s name attached to The Beyond, I figured I would probably enjoy this one.

It turns out that The Beyond was closer in spirit to The Gates of Hell, which I had rented on VHS back in my high school days after reading all about it in Fangoria magazine.  As I previously stated, The Gates of Hell underwhelmed me. 

The Beyond concerns a young woman (Catriona MacColl) who inherits an old hotel in Louisiana that just happens to sit on one of the seven doorways to Hell.  Needless to say strange things start to happen and almost all of them end in death for someone.  A man falls off a scaffold while painting the hotel.  Another man is killed by a reanimated corpse as he attempts to work on the plumbing.  People have acid poured on them, get attacked by tarantulas, and have their pets turn on them as one ghastly killing follows another.  So what is my problem with The Beyond?  I was expecting a plot driven horror film with lots of blood and what I got was more a stream of conscious nightmare loosely connected by the hotel and it’s gateway, accented with moments of extreme graphic violence. 

There are some amazing sequences in The Beyond including a zombie attack in the hospital.  The problem is when these sequences are viewed as part of a supposedly cohesive story with realistic reactions, they defy all the laws of willing suspension of disbelief.  When viewed as a nightmare set piece however, the same scene taps into that part of the brain where logic has no home.  We’ve all had dreams where we’re running in slow motion or failing to do some simple task that allows the boogeyman to catch up to us.  That is what The Beyond delivers.  When Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck) is shooting at the zombies, we quickly realize that the ones he shoots in the head stay dead, while the ones shot in the chest or stomach keep coming.  In a plot driven film, Warbeck would be taking headshot after headshot on these creatures, but in true nightmare style he continues to waste bullets by shooting the creatures in the stomach and chest unless it is a matter of life and death at which point he manages to blast away the skull of that particular zombie.

I really believe that if I approached The Beyond with a different mindset, I might actually enjoy it.  The problem is that I was looking for Zombie or Demons and I was watching the James Joyce version of a splatter film.  I don’t know if this makes Fulci a genius or a failure.  As a movie it was disjointed and a little boring at times, but as an experience, a living celluloid nightmare, I have to admit that I will not soon forget the scenes he presented.  If you’re wanting a horror movie to watch that will keep building suspense, this is not the film.  Under those conditions this film gets 1 1/2 stars.  On the other hand, if you want to experience something unique with some over the top gore and just ignore the little string of a plot that tries to tie it together, The Beyond easily earns 3 stars.  Determine your mindset to choose your rating.