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?

Rat Man - 1988

 How bizarre is it that in one of the last shots of the rat man in Rat Man I paused it and said "I know that guy!"  I did think it was Weng Weng at first but it is in fact Nelson Dela Rosa, of The Island of Dr Moreau with Marlon Brando.

Rat Man, oh man, where am I going to go with this.  There is a lot to say, there is also nothing to say.

I'm on a fucking spree right now, in fact the other movie I just watched...inport this later... that one gets a three out of five, I liked it, its solid..  Rat Man comes up as a suggested thing on Tubi (the only streaming service you need, and its fuckin free, Tubi, sponsor me!!)  Rat Man is a completely unknown 80s horror?  Slasher? Thriller? Or something?  Genre undefined.  Idea, for that matter, undefined.

Basically plot wise, a genetically mutated rat man is killing people.  Where, when, how, I dunno I wasn't fucking paying attention you dig?  One does not "watch" rat man - one just kinda challenges oneself to get through it sober, then gives up and goes to the gas station about 5 minutes before they close buys two tall boys and drinks those with some Jager - which is awful, do people actually drink this?

Yeah it is a true story and no, I didn't pay attention to Rat Man, but I mean come on, its called Rat Man and stars a midget!  Question - would this ever have a snowballs chance in hell of getting made now?  Would this ever, and I repeat ever not get canceled?  Can midgets act as mutants anymore?  Surely the answer to this is no.  

Rat Man had bad kills and a no real effects and was clearly made on a miniscule "I work at a gas station " budget, so for what it is its ok, but overall I cant give this more than 1 star.

Red Corner - 1997

 My friend and I got this 90s Richard Gere thriller on VHS and started it, got maybe 30 minutes in before he pulled the plug, saying, "this shit is boring"

Red Corner is and was a relatively unknown cash in on the then current China and Tibet crisis.  Made not so much directly about China but rather about how awful China is, Richard Gere is lead as an American who is found with a dead Chinese woman after a night of sex and gets framed for her murder.  The corrupt, awful Chinese government gets placed as the villain while Gere goes up against them.

I mean....I dunno right?  I don't know what to say about this.  Number one, it is way too long at 2 hours.  We know he's not guilty cuz it's a Richard Gere movie, so its a movie about constructing the pieces to prove his innocence.  There's mild tension in some of the court room scenes as we watch the difficulty he has with the system there, but overall he is always granted enough leeway to prove his point.

Bai Ling is his attorney and sh'e pretty good, and other than it is extremely averagely made.  It was a bomb, got bad reviews, and will somehow live forever, which is odd.  I give it like 1.5 stars.

Witchtrap - 1989

 So I confused this with the other Kevin Tenney with movie, Witchboard, which I previously reviewed on this blog.  That stopped me from writing the review a while but bam here we are with Witchtrap.

Linnea Quigley stars in this awfully acted fantasy horror movie that was clearly made to try to capitalize on the bizarre success of Witchboard.   Linnea doesn't actually star, but that is to say that no one in this movie has been in much, and when I say the acting was bad earlier, that is a vast understatement.  It has been a while, dear reader, since I last saw anything this incredibly subpar and it's refreshing to see again.  I'm not watching a lot of movies these days, and I forogt what this was like.

Witchtrap involves an old building that the main woman Agnes (2 other IMDb credits)  wants to ride of a demonic presence.  She gathers a team which has a "speaker" person, her husband, and a "body" person, Whitney.  She summons the evil and the evil stars doing evil stuff and killing people.  Its what you expect and it even has full frontal from Quigley until she is killed off.

I dunno.  What does one say more about this?  Its not a good movie.  It has basically no production value, but what they do with very little is impressive.  Quigley's death is cool, she gets impaled through the throat by a shower nozzle!  Pretty cool, unique.

She really is the queen of low budget nudity.

It gets a lot more audacious and cool as it nears the end, and basically sticks the landing, so bad acting aside it's a lot of fun.  It really has that nice late night stoned bad movie vibe, so I will give it a solid 3 stars.

Darkroom - 1989

 I might have said I am googling "lesser known slasher movies" and then searching them on my phone.  If I didn't say that, well, I am.  This is in conjunction with re-re-re-rewatching Friday the 13th series with my girl.

So yeah dude, I find Darkroom and I put it on, its free online and most of these are not.  Darkroom is sorta you're whodunnit type slasher, though not aggressively steered that way.  I called dwho the killer was pretty early on and honestly they don't try hard to hide it.  I expected a lot more red herrings.  

There's a paper thin plot of a family living in the middle of nowhere and someone is killing their neighbors and soon enough after them.  The killer is a photographer, though that plot gets dropped midway through the movie in favor of just focusing on the victims.  

The victims are fairly flavorless and bland, but then again, the movie is fairly flavorless and bland so at least they match.  As we near the end and the killer is revealed, we have a completely revealing flashback with bizarre and creepy undertones.  I can't think of many slashers right off that do this, and its not like it is handled well in this movie but it is unique and memorable, so this does have that going for it.

Darkroom won't rock the boat nor make you think too much, but it will keep you watching and it offers some decent times to be had.  I guess I'll give it like a 2.

Silent Scream - 1979

 I'm busy! Sorry, ok. It's summer,  I'm out hiking and camping and I have not been very interested in watching movies. 

So I Google lesser known slasher movies and this comes up. I've been rewatching Friday the 13th with my girl and I do like these so much that I immediately thought of that today when I was thinking of putting something on while I worked. 

Silent Scream is a pretty early slasher,  another one to add to the proto list,  but obviously after Halloween. Silent Scream also copies the idea of the older actor coming in with gravitas so this starts Cameron Mitchell as a cop guy. 

Silent Scream plays out as we follow our main girl Scotty as she seeks a place to live. She finds a boarding house run by the mousey Mason who lives there with his enigmatic mom and sister,  and few other roommates. They all get to know each other and the roommates go to the beach where one of them is murdered. Now it's a murder mystery and a few more bodies show up while the cops investigate. 

Silent Scream is a relatively tame one,  a movie without a whole lot to say but I guess at the same time it was early so I can't exactly slam it. It's pretty good! Overall. But not exactly great. It goes down easy and it's fine overall,  probably a solid 2.5 stars. 

Puppetmaster / Puppetmaster 2 - 1989 / 1990

 Ok ok ok, I was a few years off guessing the years, I guessed 1992 and 1993, but hey, what can I say I am impressed they made this in 1989.

Puppetmaster I have seen a couple of times.  I thought it had at least one known actor, I struggle to remember who I thought was in this movie, but no one is in it, spoiler alert.  The opening film to this series is also like, completely made to have sequels?  Both in the way that is doesn't explain anything but also in the way that it leaves the puppets and company intact.

"Completely unexplained" is an odd direction to have a living puppet movie go in.  It does not work.  Basically old guy Toulon is the puppetmaster and pupper maker, and he has an unknown amount of unexplained living puppets.  They're all minimally malevolent, moreso leaning towards being actively violent.  They follow the twisted will of their strange maker, and the movie follows that.

It's also very slow and has barely any puppets in it until the end.  So, it kinda sucks.  Mostly it is bad actors saying dull lines in overdone cartoonish sets and costumes.  When the puppets are on screen its an obvious highlight, and the kills are fun and imaginative.  But its like a 1.5 out of 5.

Puppetmaster II is obviously done at a higher budget, with the knowledge your audience wants the puppets in it more.  So it answers the call and has more deaths, more effects, more puppets, and more passion.  

The plot is basically Toulon comes back deformed and wrapped in gauze, and he reconnects with his puppets while we get some flashbacks and he works towards...some goal or something.  It's a who cares excuse for fun, and it is.  I give it a solid 3.5 stars.