Tokyo Joe - 1949

 I have been on a mostly unreviewed Bogart fest.  I watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre and rewatched The African Queen as well.  Good movies!

Tokyo Joe I put on without a second thought, feeling kinda sick and high on edibles while I recovered from tonsil surgery.  Humphrey Bogart stars in this film noir sorta drama, and I had no idea what to expect.

What I could never have predicted was how unintentionally hlarious moments of this were, as well as how bizarrely influential to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!  Seriously, what a strange duo of things for this movie to pull out of it's ass, but I mean seriously!  

First we meet Bogart's daughter he didn't know existed.  The uber-wooden, awfully scripted, overacted part is pure comic gold.  The little girl never blinks and delivers hyper adult, unrealistic dialogue as she doesn't move and inch and bores a hole directly into Bogey's face.  Tried to find a quote of hers from the IMDb page but nothing doing, take my goddamn word for it brah.

Then we have the place sequence where first off all I notice Bogey is dressed like Indiana Jones and then the sequence in the plane, while not being from an action movie, really reminded me of the sequence in Loa Che's airplane at the beginning of Temple.

I scoured IMDb and Wikipedia, no work on those about the connection to Indiana Jones.  What a bizarre thing though!  I mean it's not a 1:1 but watch those movies and tell me they're not loosely connected.

This is a weird one and one that sticks out.  Sometimes that's all it takes!  I give it 4 stars.

Sleepstalker - 1989

 The first movie about the fairy tale character of the Sandman came out in 1933, the most recent in 2017.  Obviously a character of some status, this little known horror movie also is sorta about the character.  Sorta.

Sleepstalker reminds me of those 3-4 middle Hellraiser movies that were barely about Pinhead and instead some stupid other story with Pinhead shoved in there in the end with 4 lines of dialogue.  It's also about the level of quality of those movies.

We begin with Griffin's family being murdered and the killer bing put on death row.  We get a priest who comes to the man on death row and gives him the ability to come back as living sand, which he obviously uses and comes back to murder some more.  Along the way some cops get  involved or whatever and some mild weird "scares" happen.

This is one that took me a long time to get through.  It moves at a glacial pace and is an hour 45 minutes which is probably about 45 minutes too long for what it is trying to do and how thin the storyline is.  Character have bad dialogue, stand around, plan things, discuss things, have zero chemistry or charisma.  It's a fucking dull, dull movie.

Then we eventually get to the priest who unveils what we already know, and cablam, final confrontation.  I dunno.  This movie is not good.  I'll give it like half a star. The effects are good, the few times they happen. It might deserve higher.  But ya know.

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural - 1973

 Halloween horror fest bayyyy-by!  The theme of the movies this year is "Tubi algorithm".  I am going to watch whatever it recommends in the first screen (or so) and this will be therefore random, and will also give you an interesting insight into what Tubi thinks I like.

Also known as The Legendary Curse of Lemora, and Lemora, Lady Dracula.

Lila is a angelic virginal singer who is a member of a church after her father is accused and found guilty of murder or something like that.  She receives a communique from her dad and sets off to find him after being told to come alone.  Doesn't sound fishy at all.  On the way, she enters an area full of cursed, psychotic people and things don't get much better when she finally arrives and meets cryptic Lemora.

The movie chugs a long and there are some pretty good sequences.  The beginning with the bus ride into town is really good, and though the movie telegraphs what is going on and what is going to happen, its a fun ride to take even with the outcome clear.  The usual lesbian undertones are present, there is a little nudity, and that's about the sum of it.

About 30 minutes were cut to make the version now available.  It's rated mature and nowadays except for the brief breast shot it's practically PG rated.  I wonder if the original cut had more violence and nudity.  This cut though, gets a relatively average 2.5.

Night Feeder - 1988

 I love how the IMDB for this says "the debut of Kate Alexander"  Yeah!  Because it was basically everybody's debut!  And also for a lot of them, their only film ever.

Night Feeder is a super Z grade slasher that no one has ever heard of.  Its amateur to the true definition, which we have seen a few times now on the blog, and the movie really looks, sounds, and feels like it.  As I may have said before, these can be divisive, a lot comes down to tone and atmosphere...

Night Feeder has main character reporter Jean in a city where young women's bodies are turning up with their brains sucked out of the heads.  She wants to write a piece on the news and begins to investigate, meets a charisma-less police guy Alonso, and gets sucked into the story.  

It cannot just be that, and so what it does instead is have a lot of weird nonsense shit whth the town blaming stuff on a weird band that sings exclusively about suicide, and having a weird subplot about prostitutes.  I tried to find the band on YouTube but I can't so you will just have to trust me, it's great.  Also great and jarring is the strange electronic score by one of the films 3 credited directors.

Sometimes you walk the line and find something which is yes Z grade but scratches the itch in just the right way.  I give it 4 stars.

The Chamber - 1996

 So I am at the thrift store and picking around VHSs, and the usual route here is to grab something unknown and random, and I pick up 1996's The Chamber in this context.

Bought for almost $4 million for a one-page idea around the height of the legal thriller, Hollywood banged down John Grisham's door to make another smash hit like The Firm.  The Chamber is originally going to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Ron Howard, that falls apart and eventually what we have here gets made.

Chris O'Donnell and Gene Hackman star in this southern story of a bomb which kills two children, and the fallout involving the killer being put on death row.  Sam (Hackman) has been in prison for 16 years and his grandson O'Donnell is a lawyer who decides to fight for him.  Sam is definitely a racist asshole, and guilty of many things, but is he guilty of the bombing?

The Chamber is a really odd movie in that we are watching our protagonist fight for a racist, and grow close to one, and Sam is not like the lovable curmudgeonly old dude who we kinda love.  He is a murderer, a slur blaring bigot who doesn't hold back and isn't trying to be on any good behavior.  Watching as we emote some sort of sympathy towards him for almost 2 hours is...an odd choice, to say the least.

We're all expecting bland leading man Chris O'Donnell to legalese his way to a happy conclusion and he doesn't, spoiler alert, so at least it does not pull punches.  I'll give it 1.5 stars and say it does move pretty quick.

Sweet Sixteen - 1983

 Also apparently stylized as Sweet 16.

I flick this on cuz Amazon recommends it and I get midway through before I realized I'd seen it before.  That's ok, I've seen a lot before.  I watched it again.  It was Don Shanks as the Native American character Jason that clued me in, I recognized him.  Don Shanks, I did not know, also played Michael Myers in Halloween 5.

Also, apparently, the role of the elder statesman character was supposed to be Leslie Nielsen.  A small change would've made this a lot better.  Nah, I kid tho, this movie is good.

Aleisa Shirley is one of the main characters, I don't know who I should say was the real main character, but she is a nice change from the typical focus.  Sexual and a bit catty she and several other people are involved in some killings in a local town.  It is all getting blamed on the Native character Jason, and the cops arrest him while others are still being hunted.

This movie is pretty solid as a slasher.  The tropes at this point are to make the victims unlikeable, but it will get worse from here and this is not as bad as some time later on in horror movies.  The kills are pretty minimal, I think this must've been made when the MPAA was cracking down a little on blood.  There are a couple topless shots and a little full bush.  Can't go wrong there.

I like it, I'll give it 4 stars.

Lost Highway - 1997

 Who knows how I got into David Lynch.  I believe I had heard the name at some point in my early teens, and it is possible my good buddy in high school Ben introduced me to Lost Highway possibly.  We liked it cuz it was insane, had Marilyn Manson and Rammstein in it, and was very transgressive.

I have rewatching both Lynch and Cronenberg throughout the years, revisiting my old teenage favorites, and seeing what does near-middle-age me think of them?  Lost Highway is memorable for many things, one of which being the standard Lynchian weirdness, but also I think in a lot of ways it serves as an interesting bridge from what Lynch was to who he became later, I see a lot of the relaunch of Twin Peaks in this, as well as a lot of Eraserhead, in a mashup perhaps a bit like Balthazar Getty turning into Bill Pullman.

It's somewhat hard to describe the plot (no surprise) but basically Fred (Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) begin receiving scary VHS tapes on their steps.  They call in cops, who have no answers, and then a tape reveals Pullman killing his wife, which he is then pronounced guilty for.  He randomly disappears from his cell and is replaced by Balthazar Getty, a delinquent non-related guy who soon enough gets involved with a woman that creepy mob dude Nice Guy Eddie is dating, also played by Patricia Arquette, and from there a creepy underworld is exposed.

Filled with Lynch moments, there are individual sequences in this which you've never seen anything like before and really will not again.  I simply do not understand how some things have not been copied, drawn from, influenced the cinema of others.  Sure, he has some thematic copycats, but I don't really understand why people don't copy this.

Thematically, hell, I'll throw in my take about the two real questions to ask:  What happens in the movie, and then, What is the movie about?

What happens:  I think if we look at this as literally as possible, it is about a man discovering his wife is cheating on him.  Pullman sees Arquette at his jazz club, and if we accept there are not two Arquette's, she's also maybe mixed in with Nice Guy Eddie.  Pullman goes a little crazy and grows distant from her before murdering her one night, killing Eddie and a few of his men as well.  He is caught and arrested.  He embarks into a fugue state and imagines himself as someone innocent (Getty), and draws many psychotic conclusions about her life that justify him murdering her. 

Thematically, I think it is about growing distant from people, and the sort of bizarre moments we wish that someone was dead or gone or would just get lost or whatever.  This film explored the reality of how dark those thoughts are, how evil exists even in the mind of innocent people, and how we use justification in different ways to explore the dark recesses of the human mind.

This movie is worth a rewatch, y'all.  It stands up.  I would love to see a high def transfer, the full screen pan and scan DVD I watched is an awful experience.

Scream - 1981

 So Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven....just kidding.  Also known as The Outing 

Scream is a simple name for a bizarrely simple but also way too complicated movie.  Scream stars nobody and was directed by a guy mostly known for stunt work, this movie supposedly started filming without a finished script or an ending in mind, and boooooyyy does it show.  

Scream is a simple enough idea, a bunch of people are at an abandoned town in the middle of nowhere and a dead body shows up and soon enough they're being hunted by a mystery killer.  The town is too far (more on this later) from anything to go get help so they try to band together and use their wits to escape the situation.

Okay, so they say it is 30 miles from the nearest help.  You know guys, I'm a hiker.  I did 13 miles, half of it uphill with an elevation gain of 3000 feet.  I did this in about 5 hours.  The average person walks a 20 minute mile.  Just wake up and head out at 6am, you'll get there by nightfall.  It is not that hard.  I'm tired of movies saying they're too far to walk to get help.

As the strangers wait in this town, random things also start happening to them.  A pair of motorcyclists come out of nowhere and they try to use the bikes to get help.  But then later the weirder one - a black cowboy comes out of nowhere with the body of their friend, drops it off, evades all questions and leaves, and is never explained.  WHAT???

The good things about this though is that the music is great, and the bizarreness does achieve a level of atmosphere that sorta pulls you in.  This is not as amateur as it could be, and the low 2.3 rating on IMDb seems a little wrong.  I'd give it like a 2 I guess.

The Vampire Happening - 1971

 Cruising through Amazon, hey I haven't watched a 70's sex vampire movie in a while.... eh, why not.

Produced by and starring Pia Degermark, this is a pretty damn fine definition of the 70s cult grindhouse movie scene.  We have topless women aplenty as a woman inherits a castle with a creepy painting of her dead relative, who looks exactly like her.  

Pia begins roaming the castle and soon enough finds a tomb in the basement, opens it and wabam, her relative is released because her relative was a vampire in the tomb.  The two women look alike and so the clumsy butler tries to kill the vampire and keeps making mistakes and pursuing the wrong woman.  This is a horror comedy, which I was not expecting, and even more what I would not have guessed was that it is actually somewhat funny!

It's a romp to see these deceptions and silly shenanigans going on and soon enough tons of people are getting turned to vampires.  There is a great Abbott at a local church who gets flashed by a vampire woman and then seduced in the woods and turned into a vampire himself, and so he is also getting into trouble and converting people to vamps.

I liked this movie, but I have also not seen one like this is a while.  So was it good or am I just nostalgic?  I dunno, but I do think this was a pretty good one.  A little overly long, but it does a good job of keeping things light and it knows what it is.  Count Dracula shows up later doing the whole "I vant to suck your blood!" thing and it's great.  I'll give it 3.5 stars.

Blue Monkey - 1987

 I'm straight up marathoning anything that sounds horror adjacent right now, and half of them or n=more are not getting reviews, sorry.  It's cuz most of them deserve only a few sentences...there's not a lot to say.

Also known as Insect!  Hell yeah with an exclamation mark.

Insect! stars Steve Railsback as a detective, though that will barely come up, all we really need to know is he's the good guy.  Dr. Steve is in this hospital concurrently as a old man is brought in who cut himself on the thorn of an unknown plant, and the man promptly dies.  Soon enough a worm like insect crawls out of his mouth and is kept in a jar by the hospital, and other people are showing symptoms of the worm disease.

This is a Canadian low budget movie and you can tell before you look it up, cuz there's for sure some nice "aboot" Canadian accents in here.  It's also very minimal, one setting, basic but cool and effective monster, and small cast of characters that work, have some decent chemistry, and even has a decent child actor.  Also, fucking very cool poster:

This is not a great movie, nor is it even that good, but it is fun enough and it is what you expect.  Real effects and a quick pacing help out a lot, and you could definitely find worse out there.  I'll give it 2.5 stars.

Wendigo - 2001

 So I am at the library and this is on a shelf and I'm like, "eh whatever, sure" and I grab it.

Wendigo is a early 2000s independent film, starring Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber.  I put this is in and I'm watching kinda expecting this to be a SyFy adjacent stupid monster movie.  I am always down for a Wendigo movie, I like the creature and I like stupid movies so like, whatthefuck.

But as this movie goes on, I kinda get drawn into the plot and as this approaches an hour and then 75 minutes I'm already guessing, is there no Wendigo in this movie?  And if that is the case, which it is, what's the angle?  The angle is using this interesting backdrop, this mythology to drop a ambiguous element to this "other suspense" movie and then to ask questions.

The other real actual plot involves a family on vacation way out in the middle of the northeast somewhere, and they run into some yokel rednecks who are immediately hostile after the family hits the guys deer with their car.  The awkwardness takes a stronger turn when it turns out this guy is their neighbor, and then when the family finds bullet holes in their house, and then when the neighbor is spying on them.  

The couple's kid finds a weird Wendigo figurine in a store, and opens up the door to this alternate viewpoint, and to cut to the point - yes - there is a Wendigo in here, but always done in a weird way where it is possible or probable that it is a imagined or hallucinated.  The Wendigo itself looks pretty cool and the rest of the movie isn't hinged around it, so it works.

I was not expecting a rather arresting drama film when I rented a movie called Wendigo, but it is definitely more that than a horror.  So therefore, I give it 3?