2025-10-22 13:52:43
When I got into the Pogues in college, it started as a push to try and reconnect with my Irish heritage. My grandparents had leprechauns and other signifiers of Ireland all over their apartment, but I’d never really appreciated the traditional music and needed a pop/punk gateway into it. Peace and Love was my entry point.
What turned me into a super-fan, though, was hearing If I Should Fall From Grace With God. In particular: “The Turkish Song of the Damned,” a raucous ghost story about a cowardly sailor being visited one night by the vengeful shipmate he’d abandoned. Shane MacGowan’s lyrics talk about ghosts and the recently deceased almost as much as they talk about booze.
One night when I went through the unfortunate college rite of passage of drinking far, far too much, my roommates thought it would help by playing one of my favorite albums for me. Unfortunately, they chose Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, the first track of which, “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn,” is about a man who drank himself to death.
It’s the thought that counts, I guess. I still remember that foul evening when I heard the banshees howl.
An under-appreciated track, though, is “Sit Down by the Fire,” also from If I Should Fall From Grace With God. It’s brilliantly placed right after “Lullaby of London,” a pretty song with sweet lyrics with a hint of the sinister:
May the wind that blows from haunted graves
Never bring you misery
May the angels bright watch you tonight
And keep you while you sleep
And it’s a perfect counterpoint for “Sit Down by the Fire,” which is a kind of lullaby that lists all of the horrible damned creatures that have crawled out of hell to torment any child unfortunate enough to live in the British Islands.
Remember this place, it’s damp and it’s cold
The best place on Earth, but it’s dark and it’s old
Lie next to the wall and cover your head
Good night and God bless, now fuck off to bed
2025-10-20 10:14:12
I didn’t see The Black Phone; I was never in the mood to watch a movie all about a kid locked in a torture murder basement. But while all of you low-brow types were frittering away your time watching movies, I enriched myself by reading the original short story, in a book.
From what I know of the movie adaptation, by expanding it to feature length, it leaned more into the supernatural, with more ghosts, visions, and psychic abilities. The original story was more prosaic by comparison, a dismal horror story with hints of the supernatural bringing about its resolution.
I’m mentioning that because I heard some grumblings about Black Phone 2 when it was being promoted, with people complaining that it was an unnecessary, even gratuitous attempt to turn what had been a tight, self-contained horror movie into a franchise. The Grabber dies at the end of the first one!
But I say that the core idea of the first one was a phone that let you talk to ghosts, so they’d already left the door wide open to have calls with dead people. And more significantly: the first one was already taking a horror story and cranking up the fantastic elements, making it more, well, Blumhouse. I think the sequel takes that even farther: it’s an exercise in style, an homage to a very specific era of early-1980s supernatural fantasy horror. And by that measure, I liked it a lot.
The premise of the sequel has Finn trying to deal with the aftermath of his abduction by getting into fights and getting stoned a lot. He’s still haunted by the events of the first movie, frequently getting calls from out-of-order pay phones and having to answer them simply with “I’m sorry I can’t help you.” Meanwhile, his sister Gwen — who was established in the first movie as having a bit of The Shine in the form of prophetic dreams — has started dreaming of a camp in the woods and the three young boys who were murdered there.
Gwen’s dreams are by far the best part of the movie, which is a good thing, because there are a lot of them. They’re filmed in a grainy, handheld camera style that looks like a Super 8 camera. They also involve her waking up within the dream and exploring to try and find the source of her visions, corresponding to her sleep-walking in the real world. There’s a really neat effect whenever she’s awakened from her dream, as the image cross-dissolves from the grainy Super 8 style to the heavily-color-graded, this-is-set-in-1982 look of the rest of the movie.
I liked this because it really made it clear that the filmmakers were going for style. The homages to early 1980s movies are all over the place — not just the suggestions of Stephen King adaptations like The Shining and Carrie and even Firestarter, but also a little bit more subtly to slashers like Friday the 13th and then later, A Nightmare on Elm Street. It didn’t strike me as derivative, but genuinely like a celebration of a particular era of movies that the filmmakers love.
Which meant that I was on board and was watching it in that spirit throughout. Early on, Gwen has a nightmare vision of a little boy at the camp being chased through the woods and then murdered by an unseen assailant. Afterwards, the boy’s body rises up from the bottom of a frozen lake, he reaches out a finger, and he scratches the letter W into the ice. My immediate thought was, I don’t mean to be cruel, kid, but I think you should mark that one as an L instead of a W.
The camp turns out to be a Christian camp that the kids’ mother had worked at as a counselor when she was younger. There are only four adults at the camp, two who’ve been there forever and seem to do all the actual work, and then two who seem to be administrators or new owners, who are sanctimonious fundamentalists there primarily for comic relief.
I’d initially thought that this was a weird and unnecessary detail, if all the movie needed was a “trapped in the snow at a creepy camp in the woods” setting. But it quickly became clear how much heavy lifting it does to establish this as a period piece. Mainstream pop culture of the early 1980s was a lot less secular than it is today, and seeing Christianity used for social persecution instead of genuine faith immediately took me back to the time I was growing up and felt surrounded by it. It was also interesting to show people who claim to believe in a higher power being confronted with proof of the supernatural, and immediately shunning it as evil.
Incidentally: I’m still not 100% sure of all the details and the relationships of the characters, since so much of the dialogue was tough to make out. For everyone, but especially for The Grabber. Respect to Ethan Hawke for taking a weird role where he never shows his face, but also there were several scenes where it was comical how difficult it was to understand what he was saying behind that mask. It was like watching a young man being taunted by one of the teachers from the Charlie Brown specials.
I thought the cast was all good, with Madeleine McGraw as Gwen being the clear stand-out. Even the characters who are there solely to be characters in an early 80s horror movie manage to feel like your memory of those characters, instead of what was likely the inferior reality. Demián Bichir is always under-appreciated. Miguel Mora — who plays a kid with a crush on Gwen — had the best scene of comic relief in a movie that I hadn’t expected to have any, playing everything exactly like a real teenager would talk. And I also felt weirdly tapped into the southern California horror movie scene when I recognized Anna Lore from Final Destination: Bloodlines.
(And a very minor note: I thought I’d caught the movie in a jarring, nitpicky anachronism at the end, when a character tells someone over the phone “it’s been a minute” to suggest that they haven’t talked in a long time. But apparently, that expression has been around since the 1970s, and it’s only me who had never heard it used in the context before the 20th century).
Ultimately, I thought Black Phone 2 was about 30 minutes too long, and it was more an accomplishment of style than substance. But I really enjoyed it, much more than I expected to, and honestly more than I enjoyed most of the movies it’s paying homage to. It was going for nostalgia, and it totally worked for me, taking me right back to the feeling of watching movies in the early 1980s and believing that they could show me anything.
And remember: Don’t cheat the phone company.
2025-10-20 01:30:00
On top of trying to keep things generally positive around here, I believe it’s important to show more grace to lower-budget independent projects than you would to bigger, commercial blockbusters. And no matter the budget, it’s always an accomplishment when anything gets finished, and a filmmaker realizing their goal is something to be applauded.
But Hell House, LLC pissed me off. Not enough to make it irredeemable, or anything; it’s better than average for a lower-budget horror movie, found footage format or not, and it’s actually stronger than a lot of horror movies with much larger budgets. It’s got a couple of moments that are really well done, and just those alone are enough to make me recommend it, with a ton of qualifiers and reservations.
The premise is that a group of people who’d been doing Halloween haunts in New York City have moved their operations to a small town upstate, taking over an abandoned hotel to stage this year’s event. We know from the start that something horrible happened on the opening night of the event, resulting in fifteen deaths, including all but one of the haunt’s staff. We’re watching a documentary that is trying to piece together what happened, using interviews with experts along with a ton of never-before-seen footage delivered by the crew’s only survivor.
Most of that footage is from Paul, a camera man who’s documenting the construction of the house. We quickly learn that all of the guys on the team are pretty douchey, and Paul in particular is a cartoonishly lecherous creep. (The original title of this post was going to be “Mr Creeper’s Hotel of Horrors”). The only woman on the team is Sara, who we see in PTSD form in the present as she delivers her account for the documentary.
We also quickly learn that the Hell House, LLC team were hacks. The movie somewhat cleverly works it into the story that the team is working on a very limited budget, not just the filmmakers, which helps explain why the effects of the haunt are so limited. Extremely fake-looking dummies and mannequins are strewn about everywhere, along with fake excrement and entrails, and it all looks to be of a quality that’s lower than the lowest-budget haunted hayride in the most rural town.
I’m aware that with horror movies in particular, you have to just accept some things and move on. I was keeping in mind that I’d just been to Universal Studios’ haunts, and it’d be ludicrous to expect a small operation to have effects on that level. You can nitpick your way out of enjoying anything.
But the whole premise of a found footage movie is that what you’re watching is real, so it’s practically begging you to notice anything that doesn’t ring true. And I just couldn’t get over the idea that these people had been doing this professionally for some time, and everything in the house itself felt so cheap and lazy. As far as I could tell, they’d hired a total of three (3) scare actors, none of them assigned to actually jump out and scare anyone. So apparently, people were paying and lining up to wander through rooms filled with stationary, sub-Spirit Halloween-level dummies, until finding the climax of a basement in which a half-naked woman chained up for a sacrifice is being stared at by sitting clowns.
Even worse than that, though, was that none of it made any sense. It was all just random “scary stuff” thrown together with not even a hint of making any of it coherent. But throughout, our team reacted like they were trained professionals and they were making solid gold.
So I figured that it must be intentional. It’s common for found footage movies to have characters that are deliberately unlikeable, and sometimes it works for effect (like The Blair Witch Project) and sometimes it just makes you roll your eyes for an hour hoping for the leads to just die already (like Paranormal Activity). It was already clear that Paul was a creep, so maybe the movie was signaling to us that all of these guys were a bunch of harmless-enough dipshits who’d gotten in over their head.
With that in mind, it all flowed well enough. Better pacing than most lower-budget horror, giving us enough footage to make a point and then moving on to the next idea. The characters are abrasive, but it doesn’t ever feel as if it’s deliberately torturing the audience by making you watch them. And the eternal question of “why are they filming this?” is handled more often than not, with nothing too jarring for me to just roll with it.
Although it will always be baffling to me how the team apparently spent more money setting up security cameras throughout the house than they did on actual haunt effects, connecting all the cameras to a central control center, and yet none of it was ever used in this found footage movie, instead doing everything with camcorders or head-mounted GoPros.
And like I mentioned, there are a couple of moments that I thought worked well, where Hell House, LLC seemed to actually have its reach and its grasp in sync with each other. The first has a POV tour of the haunt with a narrator making annoyingly lame jokes at the cheesy effects’ expense, before finding a clown mannequin standing where it shouldn’t be, looking down towards the basement. The second has our camera man doing a video diary from his bed at night, unaware that he’s not alone in the room.
One of the most annoying things that’s common to horror movies with a format like this: they usually have to be an interminably slow burn, saving all the good stuff for the end. The reason is that you can only raise the stakes so far before the characters seem like idiots for not leaving right then and there, when we’re still at least an hour away from the climax. I was worried that Hell House, LLC was playing its hand too early by having things happen that were undeniably and inexplicably creepy, recorded and verifiable, right around the halfway point. But the movie actually does a fairly decent job having the characters get past their concerns… until it doesn’t. But at least it has the sense to get rid of a character once he’s experienced something that can’t be explained away.
So it all flows pretty well, and has two genuinely good scares. Definitely not enough to spawn an entire franchise, like this movie has for some bizarre reason, but enough that if I’d just walked through this as if it were a low-expectations Halloween haunt, I might shrug and give it the review, “That was all right!” If you’re expecting something that feels like a walk through a very low-budget haunted house, then you could do worse than Hell House, LLC.
If you do choose to see it, I’d recommend you watch it for free. At the time I’m writing this, it’s on Kanopy with a library card and YouTube for free (presumably with ads).
But explaining why it pissed me off so much requires spoilers, which I’ll do below.
As I mentioned, the movie starts out doing an okay job of doling out moments of creepiness that the characters are able to explain away. It builds for a while, having the character of Paul witness increasingly creepy stuff, until he reaches the breaking point, and then disappears. That’s a fine way to have a satisfyingly scary moment in a found footage movie that still has almost an hour left to go.
But then the fatal flaw for me is when Paul’s replacement camera man Tony takes over, he sees and records something that scares the hell out of him, and then he goes on a long tirade telling everyone else to f themselves, it’s too much, he quits. The character Mac catches up with him and tells him that there’s something important that he should know.
The camera then glitches out, and shows us some images suggesting they’d been recorded on the same tape or whatever, Cloverfield-style. And then Hell House, LLC has the unbelievable nerve of cutting to Tony sitting in a field delivering a confessional to the camera, saying that he gets it now, and it’s clear that he can’t leave.
And that is some unforgivably cheap and lazy “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet” bullshit.
But me being optimistic and still wanting to meet the movie halfway, I assumed, “Ah, intrigue!” I figured that by the conclusion, we’d get the reveal of something like the main guy had an incurable disease and made a pact with dark forces to sacrifice his friends and ticket-buying guests to whatever demonic entity lives in the hell mouth beneath this abandoned hotel.
But no, it’s never resolved or explained. Earlier I’d said that any movie that a filmmaker manages to finish is an accomplishment. I can’t include Hell House, LLC in that, because they didn’t even bother to finish it. There’s a whole scene they didn’t bother writing.
Not to mention that they didn’t bother coming up with a climax, either. Instead of a reveal of what actually happened that fateful night in the basement, we get multiple grainy shots of dudes in dark robes rushing the camera before it falls to the ground and goes black. It’s literally impossible to tell what happens in most of it. I read multiple synopses that describe what happens in the shots, and I can only say, “Sure, if you say so.”
I realized that I’d spent an hour and a half being generous to a movie that wasn’t even trying to meet me halfway. I’d been seeing it as a low-budget movie about a group of hacky haunted house-makers who stumbled into something that was real and far more sinister. In fact, there was no difference between the filmmakers and the characters. The haunt just lazily slapped together clowns and pentagrams because that’s all the filmmakers could think of. “Hey, just throw out some cheap spooky shit, whatever. Doesn’t matter.”
I’ve read that the writer/director of the movie has “revealed” what the big mystery was, after the fact: Hell House, LLC was having money problems! If this haunt didn’t go through, they’d be out of business! And apparently, the character of Tony heard this and was moved to stay on in a clearly dangerously haunted house, instead of saying, “Yeah, no shit!” I’ve also seen that there’s a “director’s cut” that actually shows what happened in the basement, and it was an inexcusably cheap green screen effect of a woman being pulled down into a hole in the floor that was supposed to be a portal to hell.
I left Hell House, LLC feeling like those people at the beginning of the movie must’ve felt, standing in a long line only to wander through a lazy haunted house before reaching an anticlimactic finale with some clowns, pentagrams, and dudes in cheap black robes for some reason.
2025-10-19 04:27:17
According to IMDb’s numbers, Freaky was a financial success, mostly because of its relatively tiny budget. I don’t normally pay attention to that kind of thing, but I’d been curious why it didn’t seem to have a bigger impact. It’s a ton of fun, and it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.
Then I saw its release date: it came out in 2020. I have to wonder if it would’ve been bigger if not for the pandemic. And also if it hadn’t had a seemingly last-minute title change from its original Freaky Friday the 13th.
Pretty much the entire premise of the movie comes from that no-brainer of a title: a kind-hearted and bullied teenager, whose family is still trying to recover from the death of her father a year earlier, is attacked one night by a ruthless serial killer. He stabs her with a ceremonial dagger he’d stolen during a previous killing spree, which somehow causes the two to switch bodies overnight. Now she’s only got 24 hours to do the same thing to him, or the change will become permanent.
A movie based entirely on a gimmick and a mashed-up title shouldn’t work as well as this does. And yet it does work, not only as a horror comedy slasher with a few memorable kills, but also by surprisingly hitting all the right notes for a teen body swap comedy. It even uses home invasion to teach a lesson about believing in yourself.
Obviously a whole lot of that comes from the perfect casting of the leads. Vince Vaughn has the charisma going at dangerous levels, drawing from wells of charm that might not have been tapped to this extent since the days of Swingers. Here he gets to make fun of how big he is and how old he’s gotten1, and he plays two roles really well.
Not the “murderous psychopath” and “teenage girl” that you’d expect from the premise, but in how he plays the character Millie. There’s plenty of the “middle-aged man acting like a girl” schtick, and it is somehow still funny and charming in its corniness, but he also transitions seamlessly in and out of inhabiting the actual character: a kind-hearted teenager enjoying hanging out with her friends. It’s even easier for the audience to immediately accept that these two have swapped bodies than it is for the characters around them.
Also he’s a 50-year-old man kissing a teenage boy, and I was wondering if they were going to go there, and it made me even more uncomfortable than all the dismemberment! (I checked and the other actor was 23 at the time, but still… I guess I respect that they didn’t just cop out).
The other half of that is Kathryn Newton, who gets genre movies and horror and comedy all on an atomic level, and she knows how to nail the tone perfectly throughout. Much like her performance in Abigail, she’s got the ability to inhabit a part without being too showy, but still seemingly effortlessly is the most interesting person on screen.
In Freaky, she’s got the more thankless part of spending most of the movie as a character who deliberately has zero personality besides “murderous psychopath.” Still, she understands the reason the movie focuses on her side of the swap, and it’s more than just a way to set up the next kill (although there is plenty of that). She makes it read as a metaphor for Millie defining herself and standing up for herself — on her own terms, not those of the murderer who’s currently controlling her body. You can see a preview of the person she’s going to become after the experience is all over.
The rest of the cast is pretty fun, too. They’re all stock characters from a teen comedy, deliberately so, and the movie has fun both acknowledging that and then going on to use them exactly the same way a standard teen comedy would. Millie has the same two diverse friends that every misunderstood outcast white teen girl should: an extremely supportive black girl and an extremely sassy gay boy.
My favorite line of dialogue in the entire movie is when they’re all escaping together from the police, and the cops announce over the radio: “Suspect spotted with two youths. Teenagers. One black female, one white, uh… excited.”
I enjoyed seeing a movie that so thoroughly mimics the feel of 90s and 2000s teen comedies playing out now with more modern sensibilities. The gay kid is thoroughly, unmistakably out, and the movie simultaneously milks it for all it’s worth, and also just accepts it. There’s a scene where he tries to tell his mother2 that he’s straight to excuse having a teenage girl tied up in their dining room, and she simply says, “You are a lot of things, but you are definitely not straight.” There’s even a scene with a teenager who is still closeted and self-loathing, and the movie doesn’t present it as a tragedy, but that he’s the weird one for being both bigoted and as cocky and sexually aggressive as the other jocks.
All the cliches are in full effect here: popularity-seeking, snobby mean girls; insecure, bullying jocks; the sensitive jock who’s the object of our hero’s crush; an over-the-top sadistic asshole teacher3; a mom struggling with alcoholism in her grief. They all perform exactly the same story role that they would in any teen comedy, existing in a kind of deliberately fantastic version of high school that is far from realistic, but also not dated or too shallow to be meaningless.
Pretty much the entirety of Freaky is like that: pulling up a ton of familiar elements from familiar movies and letting each of them work exactly like you’d expect them to, but combining them into something new. Or if not exactly “new,” then at least really charming and satisfyingly well-executed.
The end credits play out over graphics that show brightly-colored images of the type you’d see in a teenage girl’s notebook, which are slashed away to show their gruesome horror movie counterparts. A heart becomes a human heart, a selfie becomes a corpse’s face, candy turns into a saw blade, a stuffed unicorn turns into a hanging teddy bear with the eyes slashed out, etc. Obviously it’s a repeat of the movie’s whole mission statement; the premise isn’t at all complicated!
But it’s also the vibe of the entire movie, navigating through genres to hit the right balance of corny vs heartfelt, silly vs scary, gory vs charming, familiar vs novel. It has to keep its kills inventive while still being more horror-house fun than sadistic, and it mostly succeeds, but more difficult than that, it has to make use of the premise to be about something when it’s all over.
2025-10-18 08:26:24
Overlord came out in 2018 and already feels like it. It feels like something that could only be made in the 2010s, and only from Bad Robot: a fairly big-budgeted VFX and prosthetics-heavy action/horror hybrid take on a schlocky B-movie concept, played completely straight with no hint of camp or parody.
And that’s not intended to be dismissive at all; I am entirely 100% behind a genre movie that knows exactly what it wants to be. I was just surprised by how quickly it’s grown to feel like an early-21st-century time capsule. Since Overlord didn’t do great at the box office, I’m hoping that it didn’t scare Bad Robot and other studios away from taking big swings like this one.
The premise is a squad of American soldiers dropping into occupied France on the night before D-Day, with the mission of destroying a Nazi communications tower built on top of a rural church. After a disastrous landing, the surviving soldiers discover that the church is home to an underground lab performing horrific experiments on the locals.
The most recognizable actor to people like me1 is Wyatt Russell, playing against type as an unlikeable soldier willing to take things too far to complete his mission. Actually, this came out a few years before The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, so maybe this one was establishing a type. In any case, when you find something you’re good at doing, keep doing it.
The main character is Private Boyce, played by Jovan Adepo, as a kind-hearted new recruit who gets in way over his head on his first assignment, and he’s repeatedly challenged to keep his integrity while completing the mission. He’s really good, with lots of opportunities to reveal the core of his character in a role that in lazier hands would just be Hero Protagonist.
And really, the fact that there is room for a little nuance and depth in what could have been a stock character is a sign of my main criticism of the movie. Overlord could easily have devolved into exploitative trash if it had been played as parody, camp, or even with self-awareness. But by playing everything like a straight action movie, it almost over-corrects in the opposite direction. It feels grim and intense, as if the filmmakers were so concentrated on elevating its B-movie concept that they forgot to make it fun.
What is fun, though, is seeing Nazis get blown up and mowed down with machine guns. Especially when they’re Nazi zombies and super-soldiers.
This has been on my list to watch ever since it was released. I wasn’t sure if it were a good fit for Spooktober, since it seemed to be more of an action movie than a monster movie. And it is heavy on the action, but the horror movie moments are pretty gnarly and really well done. Exploring a horrific lab, witnessing a horrific transformation, fending off an attack from a ravenous abomination, and seeing a long series of very unfortunate events happen to the worst, most sadistic Nazi bad guy.
As much as I want to keep seeing filmmakers making movies in the spirit of Overlord, and as much as I liked the movie, I can understand why this one wasn’t a hit. It’s well made, with good performances and good effects, and the story hits the right beats. But it doesn’t feel like the exhilarating fun you’d expect from the premise.
It’s played a little too straight to be an over-the-top monster movie, but the premise is too inherently schlocky for it to ever work as a drama, or even a realistic action movie. Maybe overcoming the amateurish corniness of a B-movie is also unintentionally removing a key part of what makes it work?
2025-10-17 03:10:25
I heard about the inaccurately-yet-awesomely-titled horror anthology Dr Terror’s House of Horrors from my friend Rain’s Maniacal Movie Countdown, and I immediately knew I had to see it.
It’s from Amicus Productions, the studio that made almost-but-not-quite Hammer Horror movies, including my undeserved favorite, The Beast Must Die. I’ve mentioned several times how much I love that movie, even though I can never articulate exactly why, and even though it’s kind of boring and not really objectively good by any measure. But even without its signature gimmick Werewolf Break — the single greatest creation in 20th century cinema — it’s such a weird combination of Agatha Christie murder mystery, blacksploitation movie, and werewolf horror that I can’t not love it.
There’s a similar vibe in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, although its format inherently makes it faster-paced and less dull. It involves a group of five men all sharing a train car from London (the House of Horrors promised by the title appears nowhere in the movie), who are joined by the mysterious Dr Shreck and his deck of tarot cards.
Dr Shreck is played by Peter Cushing, with a real beard, fake eyebrows, and an even more fake German accent. He invites each of the men to tap his deck of cards and he’ll draw four cards to foretell their future. We see each future play out in a short horror story.
In one, not-quite Joseph Cotten with a kind-of-Scottish accent plays an architect having to deal with a curse on his ancestral home and wolves howling in the distance at night. (If you think you know how this one’s going to play out, just you wait… to find out that you were exactly right!)
Another has a family man returning from vacation and enlisting M from MI6 (Bernard Lee) to help him with some landscaping problems. Another has a jazz musician going to the West Indies and doing some ill-advised cultural appropriation, in an almost-comedy vignette that has a moral about being respectful of other cultures but still manages to be extremely offensive to other cultures.
Then there’s Christopher Lee gleefully hamming it up as an insufferably pretentious art critic getting one-upped by an artist played by Michael Gough. Finally, Donald Sutherland plays an American doctor who brings his new French bride home to the states at the worst possible time, right when children in town start to come down sick with anemia and mysterious bite marks on their necks.
All of the stories are slight, completely predictable, charmingly corny, and not scary by even the most generous definition. The look and feel is a bit like Night Gallery sanded down to remove all of its scariness or sharp edges, plus the horror anthology comics Creepy and Eerie. Those comics had top-tier artists applying their talent to trash, short stories churned out so quickly to meet a quota that they invariably settle into a last-page reveal of “for you see I am also a werewolf/ghoul/vampire/choose one! BWA HA HA HA!”
It’s the “top-tier artists” that make these things impossible not to love. It is immediately apparent that Cushing and Lee (and Gough, another Hammer frequent player) are having fun with this and not taking even a single moment of it seriously, and yet it doesn’t read as camp. Meanwhile, Sutherland is bringing a more modern and naturalistic style of acting to a story, genre, and style that steadfastly refuses to be modernized — and it’s somehow both jarring and appropriate at the same time. None of it reads as “slumming” but as kind of “elevated horror” in the literal sense instead of the contemporary sense: talented people committed to the earnest execution of trash.
Which means that it’s all pretty fun. I’m committed to checking out more Amicus horror movies now, since I’ve now seen two that are so much more appealing than they have any right to be. There’s such a lack of pretense that they seem to treat the whole question of art vs. trash as completely irrelevant. “What do you mean? I don’t understand the question. These are movies, my dear boy.”