Phantoms (1998)

Dean R. Koontz - a name both makes ordinary people happy and hardcore literature fans sad and whiny. Almost anyway. I read a lot of Koontz as a kid and sometimes I think back to his books with fondness. Maybe you who are his fans might think I'm unfair when I claim he's a poor mans Stephen King, but with an unhealthy obsession with golden retrievers. That's not a bad thing, because when King sometimes starts ranting for 100 pages about a small detail Koontz explains that with a few paragraphs. Successful movie adaptations of his novels has never taken off - it started with the nice Demon Seed and since then it's never been the same really. So that's why I'm gonna write about one of my favourites, Phantoms - a monster movie for the Scream-generation starring Ben Affleck, Rose McGowan and Liev Schreiber. And Peter O'Toole of course, close to 120 years old when he made this flick.

Lisa and Jennifer, two sisters, arrives to their old hometown only to find everyone gone or butchered in the must macabre ways. Luckily for them 13 year old sheriff Ben Affleck shows up with his perverted necrophilia-interested deputy Liev Schreiber to save the day - but hey, it won't take long until everyone - except the stars - is dead and buried and Peter O' Toole enters the story. He plays a speculative journalist obsessed with "The Ancient Enemy", the unknown force who's responsible for all the mass disappearances through the ages. And FBI think it's this force, a giant worm-like energy and brain-sucking monster who's behind it all! Now they have to overpower the monster with intelligence - and a lot of shooting at random scary objects!

Phantoms is actually a really trash big budget monster movie who steals (I don't remember how original the novel is) from a lot of other movies, but that's just fine with me because I want monsters and mayhem, tentacles and slime - and giant insects, and blood and harmless gore. That's why this movie is so damn good in it's own little way. That infamous (I know some forum-geeks hate that word, because they have no imagination themselves to understand what a "great atmosphere" can be in a movie) atmosphere is actually good to, which is odd coming from the weakest part in the Halloween franchise, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.

Talking about stealing scenes - there's stuff that's almost identical to John Carpenters The Thing, Chuck Russell's The Blob and, believe it or not, Joe Dante's The Howling - the last scene to be more exact. Hardly not an original idea, but I always confuse these two bar-scenes with each other.

But Phantoms still manages to be it's own good movie and even if all the actors playing cops looks around 20 years too young, they're doing fine. Ben Affleck shows already here what a good charismatic (yes, that's 100 % true) actor and hero he is. It would have been easy, like - more or less - Schreiber to joke away the movie, be more over-the-top and silly, but Ben does what he does good here and he's a good anchor for us in the audience. Peter O'Toole, I love the guy, but it's quite obvious here that he's not really "in" the movie. He's having troubles delivering the dialogue convincingly, probably because it's very silly and unconvincing - except in the last little speech he as before the final monster-showdown. That's good stuff.

Once again, this is an underrated movie. It's a lot of fun, has nice monsters and tentacles and a story that goes directly to the mystery and action without a boring set-up. Is this out on BD? I would love to upgrade my crappy Swedish DVD!

The Devil's Men (1976)

It took me some years to finally sit down and watch The Devil's Men (aka Land of the Minotaur), but when I got my hands on Scorpion's new DVD release I had to use some of my savings (and believe me, that's not much at all) to buy it. Even if Peter Cushing is a brilliant actor and an awesome character my favourite actor in this movie is the always enjoyable and colourful Donald Pleasence. He often did better work than Cushing in these obscure horror-jobs and took the chance to really use everything he learned as an actor and twist it a couple of times. Cushing mostly looks tired. Anyway...

Young couples is disappearing in Greece and when friends of a priest (Pleasence) also gets lost he sends after his friend Milo (Kostas Karagiorgis), who's a random tough guy/private detective/man of mystery/whatever. Milo starts an investigation and soon find out that more couples has disappeared over the years, and everything is connected to the old pagan temple who's around the corner. Is the suspicious Baron Corofax (Peter Cushing) involved somehow? Is he the leader of an ancient cult worshipping the Minoatur? Well, guess.

Most reviews I've read is quite negative, and in a way I can understand them. The script is all over the place, the direction is uneven, the actors ranges from really good to just very, very bad. BUT The Devil's Man also has a lot of atmosphere and a imaginative storyline filled with human sacrifices, nudity and bored acting by Cushing. Everything involving human sacrifice looks excellent, with sect members in colourful capes, a fire-blowing Minotaur statue, even some blood - and yes, the traditional fisheye objective to make everything look a little bit more distorted and fucked up, a nice seventies tradition.

Another fresh idea is to make the priest a really nice and fun guy, who enjoys young people and joking - good food and maybe some flirting, and still takes his job seriously. It's a nice departure from all the stiff priests I've seen. Only Donald Pleasence could have done it and it wouldn't surprise me if he created a lot of this character himself.

I've seen gorier movies than this one, but it has a couple of stabbings that looks okay and a sequence when several characters explode in pieces of blood, dust and flesh. That's about it. But the general style of the movie and the wild script makes it better than it people say it is. Another very odd thing is the score, composed by Brian Eno of all people! The song over the end credits is extremely good, I love satanic 70's rock - but I highly doubt that it's THE Paul Williams singing, it's very far from his voice and style. Anyone have an mp3 of this track?

The only bad movies are boring movies. This was a little bit boring, but overall a very fun and entertaining piece of Greek trash from the golden years. The DVD from Scorpion is, what I've heard, an "uncut" version that differs slightly from the other DVDs out there. I have no idea what's missing, but I'm so naive that a trust people and it's better I recommend this version to be on the safe side.

Yeah, that's about. A bad movie getting a bad review. 

The People Who Own the Dark (1976)

From the deranged mind of León Klimovsky comes this oddity, The People Who Own the Dark, a doomsday-vision starring Alberto de Mendoza (the crazy priest in Horror Express!) and our beloved Paul Naschy, here on each side of the morality - Naschy being the baddie of course. I've never seen it before but Jocke has talked about it so many times that I've started to question my own sanity! Can Jocke be right? Well, usually he's right - and I'm happy I bought this one directly from Code Red! Why? Let's see...

A troupe of rich bastards - politicians, doctors, businessmen etc - goes to a villa out on the countryside for a weekend of sinful lust á la de Sade, complete with role playing in the cellar and gluttony like it was their last day alive. But when they're just gonna start the orgy a terrible explosion shakes the land and not long after they hear that it's a nuclear war out there. The next morning they goes outside and takes the cars to the next village to try to get some supplies. But what awaits them is hell, all people has gone blind and they're very aggressive! After some scuffle a couple of the blind people are dead and our heroes head back to the villa - but during the night they're attacked, the blind people wants their revenge and they do anything to get inside!

It's starts off like a simpler version of Pasolini's Saló, then becomes a post-apocalyptic thriller and finally enters the horror world with the nightly invasion. The atmosphere is more similar to George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but much of the interaction reminded me more of Boris Sagal's The Omega Man. This is of course very good, but Klimovsky sets his own stamp on the movie and in the end it's an original take on the world after a nuclear-tomorrow. The characters are cynical and the story itself is bleak, both visually and thematic. This is a tale of the corrupt bourgeois and how they're punished for being soulless people. But we all know that the bourgeois is just the middle man, and there's also a government that shouldn't be trusted in the background, which makes this movie even more dark and interesting.

The cast, lead by de Mendoza and Naschy is excellent. They do a perfect walk on a line between totally fucked-up and quite human. One of the characters suffers a nervous breakdown for example, believing he's a pig and can only walk on all four for the rest of the movie. Isn't that wonderful and bizarre detail! A young Antonio Mayans, seen in many Jess Franco movies, makes a good performance also - and don't forget the always stunning Maria Perschy in another part.

The scariest thing with the antagonists, the blind people, is that they seem very sane. You can talk with them, discuss, they almost seem friendly - but still, the only thing they want is revenge. Their lack of sight has suddenly gotten them extra sensitive hearing, and maybe even sensory, making them to killing machines when they feel that someone is in the room trying to get away. How they find the house I have no idea, but when watching the movie it's nothing you react to. They're just the enemy and they're obviously very good at it.

It's not a graphic movie, but people die and the overall feeling is that it's a violent and dangerous world and it's easy to die - from the blind people or from someone inside the house. Everyone is dangerous in situation like this.

If you like your movies from the 70's with bleak endings and Paul Naschy doing one of this best performances, this is the movie for you. It's on a nice DVD from Code Red and it's a must buy!

It Follows (2012)

I know, it's a rare thing I'm writing about books here, but sometimes I feel it's needed. We're all brainwashed fans of "video violence" and trashy movies dealing with every immoral subject there is in the world, but what's better than a good book where we can use our own sick imagination to create these sick fucking worlds inside us? I recently bought Joe Bannerman's It Follows, a collection of short stories I would never know about if it wasn't for Twitter - so take that Twitter-haters! I love Twitter (and here's Bannerman's Twitter), except those days I hate it more than I hate Facebook. My love for short stories is almost bigger than my love for Biblical melodramatic epics starring Stephen Boyd, so this was a must read for me.

Full Tank is the perfect beginning, a action-packed invasion movie. Zombies? No. Aliens? I don't think so. Demons? I doubt it. Instead there's some freaky grey ultra-fast monsters reminding the main character about his grandmother who suddenly appears and starts killing everyone in sight. Together with his blind friend and a aggressive redneck he flees by car, and the rest of the story is a classic tale of survival. This is good shit, this is close to a masterpiece. No, not close. This is a masterpiece, one of the finest monster stories I've read in a long while.

Next up is Poseidon Rising, a poetic, intimate Lovecraftian story about sacrifice and sea monsters. It's drastically different compared with Full Tank and it's a good choice to relax the readers with emotional action rather than physical one. This one gave me goosebumps and it echoes of Bradbury, Dahl and the above mentioned Lovecraft.

The third story is Does It Ever Get This Cold In Paris?, a darkly humorous story set from the perspective of the zombies in an upcoming zombie-invasion. It's solely based on dialogue, on a wittiness that's directly from one of those old horror comics - or Creepshow, you know the deal. It's dark but never mean-spirited and somehow, weird enough, very human in it's macabre setting.

Fourth man out is the very disturbing Hello, Lovely. The set-up is a couple of guys staking out a house in the suburbs, but what seems to be a very simple job suddenly turns out to be something very different. I don't want to say so much about this one, but it has a fantastic gallery of characters and both a mystery and just plain out horror. I could easily see this as an episode of Tales from the Crypt or some other similar TV-show.

The last one is Salad Days, which begins like every normal social-realistic drama set in kitchen but soon transforms to something way more complicated. Also very well-written with amazingly real characters, and also something you should read to experience to the fullest.

After reading this ninety pages long collection, well worth every penny, it feel I want to read more. I want to have more of Bannerman's stories, I would love to see him make a full-blown novel from at least Full Tank. Salad Days could also be the beginning of something much longer, it SO good. Usually I try to give some constructive criticism, but I can't honestly find anything to complain about. Here we have five excellent, intelligent stories about humans - not some not so human - how faces pure terror.

I think you should go to this place and buy a copy of It Follows. It cost me 17 dollars including shipping to Sweden, which is a steal if you want to read something good and also support a great author. 

IT FOLLOWS from Daily Grindhouse on Vimeo.

The Shadow of Death (2012)

I might be honest directly: I've always been extremely suspicious when it comes to new shot-on-video slashers, made in the backwoods of someone's home with friends and family as actors. But that's basically the same suspicion I get when I see that Tim Burton's gonna make a "Quirky big budget indie movie with lots of make-up and neo-gothic curls in the set design, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter". It's just healthy, because you never know what you gonna get - except in Tim Burton's case, you know it WILL be crap. The real talent, the real creative film forces you'll find nowadays outside the Hollywood system - for example in your own backwoods. Gav Chuckie Steel has never made a movie before, but it didn't stop him from taking a camera and shooting a whole damn feature length movie, The Shadow of Death, on his spare time - which was hard because of it's full time night job and taking care of two kids at the same time! 26 pages and shooting on weekends grew much bigger and soon he made his first horror movie. That's very sweet, but is it any good? Read on...

Debra, Jamie and Nancy (Debra Hill, Jamie Lee Curtis and Nancy Loomis?) meets up with their stoner friend Dan (who just got a nasty infection in his dick) to got out in the woodlands to score some weed from a Rastafari friend of his. But someone is lurking out there in the forest, dressed in monk suit and being terribly angry, killing of everyone coming out there - often by impaling them on the nearest unexpected object!

Yeah, that's basically is. It's a standard generic slasher, but differs from many other SOV movies by actually having a lot of talent behind and in front of the camera. Chuckie Steel loves his camera and uses it in every creative way he can find. The opening shot, introducing our main characters, is a tribute to Argento's extreme close-ups, with a camera going around all the objects on the table and in the hands of the characters. The dialogue is fast and witty and the actors - I haven't learned their names yet - is very charming and charismatic. Maybe not amazingly fantastic and realistic, not yet, but if they can star in yet another movie we WILL see some stars coming out from this group of darlings.

It's mostly the passion for filmmaking that catchers my attention in The Shadow of Death, because there's very little budget. I would say the budget is so small that it wouldn't even count as a budget, just spare money they had laying around on the kitchen table. But this also sparks the energy and the editing, photography is all over the place - but still feels like it's on the right place.

How about the gore then? Yeah, it's pretty gory in the old-school way. I don't want to spoil the effects, but they're graphic and creative and a little bit nasty. The comedy, by the way, is more in the school of Shaun of the Dead, Inbred and Severance - very British and more in the characters than in the situations, which is of course the best way to handle the mix between comedy and horror.

I need to whine a little bit. after around forty minutes the elegant pacing stops brutally and we're forced to watch a scene where three of the characters tell each other stories around the fire place. The scene itself isn't bad, but it's too long - so long that one of the characters even cracks a joke about it. I realize it's there because they needed a bridge to a more darker and serious atmosphere, but it also fucks around with my attention-span. That's it, that's my only complain. The rest of the movie suffers from the usual problems like no-budget movies have, but that's very fine for me and it's nothing serious.

Ah, and I almost forgot. The excellent soundtrack! Which reminds me to contact the director to force him to send me an mp3 of the title track. Like almost everything else in this movie very retro, very Wicker Man. It's both very inappropriate for a slashers and perfect at the same time. 

I'm pretty sure The Shadow of Death will get good distribution sooner or later and it's worth it because it's a fine little comedy/slasher with good gore and a wonderful bunch of characters.

The only thing that makes me bitter is that it's of course made in a different country which even more proves how boring Sweden is when it comes to independent filmmaking!

The Ghost Galleon (1974)

I wonder what went on in the mind of Amando de Ossorio when he wrote The Ghost Galleon? I'm not sure he even wrote it properly, maybe just scribbled down a few notes on the back of a napkin and hired and old ship to shoot his third epos in the Blind Dead series. I refuse to say it's a bad or boring film, but it's INCREDIBLY stupid. It's the Dawn of the Mummy of the Blind Dead's or maybe more Bruno Mattei's Zombies: The Beginning. The set-up is extremely silly and doesn't work at all, the body count is low - but it has a few very redeeming factors.

In a not so smart PR-stunt the owner of a boat-factory hires two super models to be lost at sea for one month - we're talking two women with perfect make-up in an open boat here - in more than one day! After thirty days the plan for them is to be found by a ship, but they have drifted into a fog and the only ship they see is a weird, abandoned ghost ship. A friend of one of the models forces herself into the adventure and after a while she and the PR-staff is getting trapped on the ghost ship - exactly when our heroes, our friends and loved ones - the blind eastern knights - rises once more!

Somehow de Ossorio manages to pad out the whole movie with people walking around on the boat without getting killed and a very, very stupid sub-plot about another super model being held prisoner so she can't tell media about the PR-stunt. Yes, she's more or less kidnapped - like that would help the boat-manufacturer (played by the always fantastic Jack Taylor by the way) afterwards when the girls is supposed to be rescued from the boat. It's not much going on at all in The Ghost Galleon and most of the characters act like very slow redneck farmers.

Don't even mention the boat miniature used for the ghost ship. It looks like something like this...

...but less realistic.

So what's good about The Ghost Galleon? Well, first of all the cast is very nice - specially my favourite man Jack Taylor in an awesome striped polo. The ladies looks good and screams like a real scream queen should and everyone seems happy about their pay check. The blind knights looks better than ever, really. They are less stiff, have more thought-through movements and the hands is - for the first time in the series - convincing. Kinda anyway. Another fine detail is the ship - if it's a set or a real ship I don't know, but here de Ossorio uses the locations in an excellent way. Lots of atmosphere, smart directing and lots of fog. If he could have put the whole movie, every scene, on the boat and added a few more deaths this would have been a classic in it's own little way.

The deaths yeah. Not so much to talk about except one very graphic kill of one of the ladies. Cheap, but as usual very bloody and effective - and the scene when she's chased is the longest and slowest ever filmed, but it looks great and she makes fine job looking scared shitless!

The movie is saved by the stunning last scene, when... I'm not gonna tell you, but it looks great and powerful. I just wish the whole flick was better as a whole. There's certainly good things with it, but yeah, I need to come out from the closet to say it's the weakest of the Blind Dead films...

Les Documents Interdits (1989-1991)

Here you have something very interesting and the cause of some controversy even today. Les Documents Interdits (The Forbidden Files) is 12 (and later 13) pieces of film and video collected by filmmaker Jean-Teddy Filippe between 1986 and 1989, all dealing with the unexplained and the paranormal. My partner G saw some of these on Polish TV during the end of the eighties and was really scared and if you search the internet for the address 1036 Sun Ave you will still find discussions about the mystery behind the footage.

The thing is, of course, that everything is fake. A complete hoax conducted by Filippe to show what a powerful medium television is and how easy it is to plant "fact" into the viewers. This was officially declared when the 13th episode was released in 2010, if I've gotten the facts correct. So what the hell is this? This is something you should experience, preferably after the night has entered, maybe alone or with someone dear to you.

It starts with 12 episodes, both found footage and documentaries. We witness a man rise from the water and kidnap a diver, we see a man living without food on a life boat waiting for something, filming his life trying to survive. We see a man visiting a friend and going out in the desert where something makes contact. A wonderful documentary tells the story about Tibor Nagy, who with the help of a UFO, travelled the moon with his car. Cyborgs in Russia, a ghost hunt who goes wrong, live on TV. Episodes telling us about the unexplainable.

Les Documents Interdits is so well made. We're travelling all over the world, in several languages, sometimes the stories seem connected - sometimes not. The water, people who disappears into nothing and SCAR (an organization) comes back from time to time, like an outerworldly conspiracy. Sometimes it's funny and absurd, like the Russian cyborg who get stuck with his hand in a window - or touching like with the aged Tibor Nagy and his trip to the moon. The older episodes is eerie and strange, almost too intimate to look at. Personal tragedies that can't be explained.

This is without a doubt a project that's well before it's time. Sure, you had Cannibal Holocaust, Zelig and Spinal Tap - but this is very far away from these very cinematic experiences. This is the first time we see something that The Blair Witch Project later tried to do, with maybe the exception of the UK TV-movie Alternative 3. Jean-Teddy Filippe also succeeds with doing this because he never fails to let his ego win. There's not credits, not "Look what a fucking brilliant filmmaker I am!"-bullshit. This is hardcore found footage the way it should be.

I'm not saying everyone's gonna like this. It's a bit arty and very weird, especially the first episodes, very "French" if you know what I mean? The second batch of episodes seem to have a higher budget, they seems more planned and with a clear idea behind. This is both good and bad. There's masterpieces like The Madman at the Crossroads and The Ferguson Case, and less focused stuff like The Extraterrestrial. From the first episodes I would say The Witch and Ghosts stands out like stunning pieces in the found footage genre.

The 13th episode, The Examination, is out on Arte's homepage, but I haven't seen it yet. They say it's the beginning of a new season after all these years. So I'm saving it for that perfect lonely night when I need to get really fucked up before sleep.

Maybe tomorrow? Maybe next year. I don't know people, I don't know...