The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: Arachnophobia (1990), directed by Frank Marshall

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune - "Boris The Spider", by The Who 

 

 

I’ll tell ya, I was not a brave kid when I was a kid. Didn’t like the dark, didn’t like water, didn’t like heights, it all got a thumbs down from. I especially wasn’t a fan of the creepy crawlies, bugs, spiders, crabs, republicans, all those slimy things with too many eyes and nasty mouths. So naturally I’ve spent much of my film watching ‘career’ avoiding movies that might feature these things in abundance, because my goal is actually to enjoy what time I have on this planet. But not today. Today we’re getting uncomfortable.

In Arachnophobia, Jeff Daniels (Dumb & Dumber, The Purple Rose of Cairo), stars as Ross Jennings, a doctor who has recently moved to the small town of Canaima California. Unfortunately there are a couple of problems. For one, the doctor who was supposed to retire has decided he’s not going to do that, leaving Jennings in a bit of a financial bind. For two, the basement in his new house is totally fucked, so there goes his wine cellar. And for three, he’s a terrible arachnophobe just as the town is getting infested with a highly venomous, extremely invasive and incredibly murderous breed of spiders from the mountains of Venezuela. When it rains it pours, right?

So this isn’t a ‘giant spider’ movie as I was expecting (probably thinking of the David Arquette vehicle Eight Legged Freaks) but a ‘lots of spiders’ movie (like the Willia Shatner vehicle Kingdom of Spiders). Except unlike Kingdom of Spiders, which had a lot of unmoving arachnids, these things are everywhere and they’re crawling and jumping all over people, and they make sure to get plenty of closeups. So even if you’re more tolerant of the normal size spiders, they make sure you are going to be experiencing a world of hell every which way you can.

This is actually the debut film of Frank Marshall by the way, a co-owner of Amblin Entertainment at the time, and I think you can feel the influence even before you see Spielberg’s name in the executive producer spot. It’s very classically cinematic in that Spielberg way, especially in the opening with that surging, brass-heavy orchestration and the sweeping shots of Venezuela, but even in the ‘small town authorities ignore obvious warning signs until threat becomes impossible to ignore’ setup is reminiscent of Jaws. By the way, one of the other movies that Marshall directed was Congo, which was also Spielbergian, except that instead of dinosaurs and sharks it was gorillas and Tim Curry.

Which I don’t say to write Arachnophobia off, because obviously to be compared to one of the most successful directors ever isn’t an insult, but also because Marshall isn’t just playing copycat. There’s a bite of gallows humour here that I don’t feel comes up often in Spielberg’s own projects, that helps balance the movie on that line between horror and comedy. I mentioned that the film had the influence of Spielberg, but you could also see the film as one calling back to those classic horror movies of the past that were popular at the time. Not a specific, serious remake like The Blob or The Fly, but a madcap tribute to that era like Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Except without the cotton candy cocoons filled with blood, and more John Goodman being John Goodman.

Obviously if you have severe arachnophobia then you don’t need me to tell you to avoid this movie, you’re already doing it. For other folks, I’d say this would actually be a solid pick for a family movie night. It’s got the frights but nothing graphic, it’s got comedy, it moves at a brisk pace, it’s got Mimi from the Drew Carey Show in a minor role, it’s an easily digestible, easily enjoyable movie. And when I say digestible, don’t think about that one statistic that says you swallow around 12 spiders while you’re asleep every night.

STATUS: RECOMMENDED

 

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Boiling Point (1990), directed by Takeshi Kitano

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Ichiro Goes to the Moon", by The Baseball Project

       Quite an interesting fellow, this Takeshi Kitano. I first knew him as the creator of the bizarre Japanese game show ‘Takeshi’s Castle’, which was redubbed as ‘MXC: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge’ on Spike TV in the early 2000s. Later on I became aware of him as the brains behind Takeshi No Chousenjou, or Takeshi’s Challenge, an infamously shitty game for the Nintendo Famicom which was made with the intent of confusing and frustrating its players, like forcing players to wait five actual minutes for a code to appear or sing a several minute long perfectly (the Famicom controller featured a built in microphone). That this guy was a filmmaker, a relatively successful one at that was this nebulous thing in the back of my mind, like I knew it was true but I had no idea what to make of that information. So I avoided it for years, until the winds of fate shifted me in his direction and I said ‘fuck it’. I feel like he’d want it that way.

‘Beat’ Takeshi’s second feature-length film, released only a year after his debut Violent Cop, Boiling Point centers mostly around Masaki, a young man with a personality not unlike a boiled cabbage. Masaki lives a simple life, drifting between his job at a gas station and pinch-hitting for a shitty neighborhood baseball team known as the Eagles, until his lackadaisical attitude ends up getting him in trouble with the Otomo Group, a local branch of the Yakuza. Masaki’s friend and coach Iguchi, himself a former gangster, attempts to resolve the conflict only to receive a beating for his trouble, and subsequently disappears, supposedly traveling to Okinawa in order to buy a gun so he can kill the bastards. Masaki then decides that he too will travel to Okinawa and buy some killing machines, and the whole sordid tale unfolds from there. I don’t know where the boiling part comes in though.

Taken on its own, something like Takeshi’s Challenge might have seemed like a conceited vanity project, but after watching Boiling Point you realize that this is just the way Beat Takeshi rolls. The whole movie is like trying to have a drunken conversation with your girlfriend’s disapproving parents; The long pauses, the sudden shifts to other subjects, the awkward conversations, and of course the explosive bursts of violence. It’s all natural though, there’s never a sense that he’s riding someone’s coattails or trying to follow. Where other directors have their visions sullied by outside interference, Beat Takeshi has made the exact movie he wanted to make, i.e. full of Yakuza and designed to weird people out. You might not respect it, but you have to recognize it.

       Combining bleak, nihilistic or absurdist humor with the ‘crime’ genre is a pretty popular combo, especially in the late 80’s-early 90’s when Kitano stood side by side with filmmakers like the Coens and Quentin Tarantino, but I think Boiling Point might be a case where things got a little too absurdist for its own good. Progressing the plot feels like it takes at least half the film, and even when we do progress we are subjected to endless amount of faffing about in the process. Which can have a certain appeal when you’ve got the cast to support it, which is not the case with Boiling Point. Aside from the character Takeshi plays himself there’s nobody in this movie that’s all that compelling, especially Masaki, who as I mentioned loses out to a block of wood in a charisma contest. Which means that those 90+ minutes very crawl along at a snail’s pace, as we are subjected to Kitano’s pretentious attempts at being edgy and lolrandom. 

       This is his second movie though, at least in terms of directing, so I guess we can give him a little leeway in that regard. For fans of gallows humor by way of gangster movies Boiling Point might be the thing to cure what ails you, to others it’s just a sign that the water for their instant ramen is ready. Either way it’s not a must-watch movie, and I don’t feel an urge to recommend it. The choice, however, is always yours.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Wild at Heart (1990), directed by David Lynch

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Love Me Tender", by Elvis Presley

       Sometimes you just get into those kinds of moods, you know? You get a sudden urge to eat salty foods or watch ice hockey, and the feelings won’t subside until you bite the bullet and do the thing. So it is with me and the films of one Mr. David Lynch, guru of transcendental meditation and all around weird guy. It’s been a while since we last saw him, Blue Velvet in Marathon ‘17 to be precise, and I knew from the moment I was crafting this year’s list that he needed to make an appearance. The question was, what film to go for? The Elephant Man? Inland Empire? A ‘proper’ review of Eraserhead after all these years? I mean it’s not like we’re spoiled for choice, Lynch’s career isn’t defined by a Hitchcockian work ethic, but a choice still has to be made. What to choose, what to choose…?

       So I just went with the one with Nic Cage in it.

       Our story begins in Cape Fear, somewhere on the border between North and South Carolina. Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) are just about the most prototypical of young lovers that you’re ever gonna see, a fact which infuriates Lula’s mother Marietta Fortune, so much so that she hires someone to try and kill him. It fails, although Sailor ends up in prison a few months for manslaughter, and when the release date finally rolls around he and Lula ditch Cape Fear and hit the road for sunny California, the land of hopes and dreams. Marietta Fortune takes that about as well as she did before, only this time she goes to a man named Marcellus Santos, a man intimately connected with both Lula and Sailor’s past and one with varied, dangerous connections. Will Sailor and Lula’s love managed to withstand the machinations of Lula’s mother and Marcellus Santos, or will the yellow brick road lead them down the path to ruin? And yes, that is a Wizard of Oz reference, one of approximately 5 hundred you’ll be hearing when you watch this movie.

       With critical darling Blue Velvet still only a couple years old, and Twin Peaks taking the television world by storm, Lynch was arguably at the peak of his popularity in 1990, and it shows in Wild Heart’s production. Not only do we have Angelo Badalamenti working his magic on the score, but the movie feels absolutely stuffed with talent, both new and old additions to the world of Lynch. Nic Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Zabriskie, Jack Nance, and that’s just a portion of the folks in the opening credits. It’s like Lynch had suddenly received a big fat inheritance from a deceased relative and this was the result of the subsequent shopping spree. 

       Ironically though, aside from Dune, Wild at Heart might be the least Lynchian Lynch that I’ve covered so far. Sure, you’ve got the blending of the old and the modern, bizarre cast of characters that speaking nonsense, the veneer of placidity that masks the grimy, horrific truth that are staples of many Lynch works, but not presented quite the same way. In films such as Lost Highway, the main character’s dialogue could damn near fit on one sheet of paper; In Wild at Heart it feels as if there’s almost constant dialogue, Sailor and Lula can’t seem to exist in each other’s company without delving into each other’s most innermost thoughts. Rather than the long, pregnant pauses of Mulholland Dr., Wild at Heart is a wild (natch) beast; Scenes will suddenly explode with energy, music blaring, what have you, we constantly cut away from scenes for flashbacks and such, about every other one actually being relevant to the story. It’s a different kind of Lynch behind the camera here, or at least it feels like it, and this Lynch likes to play things fast and loose.

       Angelo Badalamenti returns to music duty this time around as I said, and in many ways it’s just as eclectic as the film itself. From the smokey, smooth jazz straight out of Twin Peaks to death metal in the blink of an eye, with some stops at big band, blues, garage rock and folk along the way. All stuff that I enjoy by the way, so even if it does get a bit herky-jerky it’s probably one of my favorite soundtracks for a David Lynch film so far. 

       I’m not sure how I feel about Wild at Heart though, if I’m being honest. Sometimes it feels like a continuation of Blue Velvet, where the innocent ‘dream world’ our characters attempt to exist in is intruded upon by the ‘real world’, with Sailor and Lula’s constant references to the Wizard of Oz (a story which ultimately reveals itself to be a dream) being the obvious nod to that. Other times it feels like some kind of ketamine-laced fairy tale, complete with evil mother figure, as our protagonists take the archetypal journey, face the archetypal trials and learn the archetypal lessons in hallucinatory and dissociative ways. Which on paper sounds fine, but in execution it can come off as tone deaf in areas that he should and has treated seriously, and bizarrely gooy in others, not in the way we’ve come to expect.It’s almost as if Wild at Heart was an attempt by Lynch to create his own Raising Arizona and the styles just do not mesh well together.

       Of course a lot of people were sold just on the fact that the words ‘Nic Cage’ and ‘David Lynch’ were in the same sentence, and yes, if you ever wanted to see the star of National Treasure belting out Elvis Presley songs then this is the movie of your dreams. Other than that it’s actually a rather mellow performance from him, perhaps because he’s working next to amazing actors like Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe that he doesn’t need to take things off the rails. Still, listening to the guy from Con Air talking in an exaggerated Elvis drawl for 2 hours is something you need to see to believe.

       A magic realist road trip crime thriller romance movie. Even now I’m still not sure what to make of it, but I guess if it’s still got me thinking about it now then that’s a good sign. Wild at Heart gets the recommendation from me, for better or worse you can always count on David Lynch to provide a unique cinematic experience. Grab your favorite snakeskin jacket and a bowl of popcorn and treat yourself to a weird Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Frankenhooker (1990), directed by Frank Henenlotter

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Let's Talk About Sex", by Salt N Pepa

       There are some films out there that exist more as a concept or an idea than they do as actual films. Waterworld, for example, is almost never discussed in terms of how it works as a film, but rather in terms of how much money it didn’t make. Similarly, there was 2 or 3 times more people screaming about the idea that the 2016 Ghostbusters was primarily cast by women then who actually saw the film, and despite all that vitriol barely any even talks or thinks about that movie these days. Chalk it up to societal decay I suppose, and not every film needs to be gone over with a fine tooth comb, but it is unfortunate how quick we are sometimes to reduce something that is meant to be art, the cumulative effort of dozens or even hundreds of people across months or even years, into an abstraction. Not even an object, but a couple of words or a brief thought. Pretty wild.

       Such was the case for with today’s film, Frank Henenlotter’s 1990 film Frankenhooker. Literally the only thing I knew about this movie was the infamous quote by Bill Murray, “If you see any film this year, make it Frankenhooker’ (I might be paraphrasing). Given that this is SNL alum Bill Murray, beloved comedic actor of the silver screen, you couldn’t ask for a more loaded statement. Was he saying that it was a good movie? A funny movie? A movie that was so bad that it was good? There’s no real way to tell, especially when you’re talking about a movie called Frankenhooker, except to watch the damn thing and figure it out for yourself. So that’s what I did, and that’s why we’re here. What a journey.

       Anyway, Frankenhooker. James Lorinz stars as Jeffrey Franken, some mook who lives in New Jersey with his mom, works for the electric company, and has a passion for mechanical engineering and amateur surgery. When his girlfriend, the slightly plain Elizabeth Shelley, dies in a freak remote controlled lawnmower accident, Jeff becomes desperate to bring his lady love back to life. Unfortunately for Jeff, the lawnmower didn’t much of Liz left to work with, besides a head that Jeff keeps in a cooler of estrogen-based preservative fluid in his shed. Jeff needs some female body parts, but how on Earth is he supposed to get his hands on those? Why it’s simple! Just head on over to Times Square, hire a couple women, and then murder them in order to raid their corpses! What could possibly go wrong?

       With a name like Frankenhooker, you might expect that film’s humor leans towards the raunchy, crass amd low brow, and you’d be entirely correct. A character who drills into his own brain with a power drill in order to relax, ‘super crack’ that makes people explode when you smoke it, and plenty of naked breasts, for all you 13 year old boys out there that don’t have access to the internet but do have access to obscure movies from the 90s. If you’ve seen a Troma movie, Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke’em High, and so on, then you’ve got an idea of what Henenlotter is shooting for here. Which could be a point against it, depending on your preferences, but here and there amongst the grime there’s a wit to Frankenhooker’s writing that manages to shine through, propelled by James Lorinz’s performance. The scene between Jeff and his mother is arguably funnier than the entirety of some Troma movies that I’ve reviewed in the past, and yeah I mean you Tromeo and Juliet, but engenders the same atmosphere of morbidly cartoonish sleaze that you don’t really see in movies anymore without the bare-bones budget that a lot of those movies work under.

       Not that it’s without its flaws, obviously. The man who plays the drug dealing pimp Zorro’s acting, for instance, is perhaps the most Tromalike aspect of the entire film. Frankenhooker also feels...stifled, in its execution. It doesn’t ever get as wild as you think it could be (or maybe I’m just desensitized at this point), and at the same time Henenlotter never seems to use the silly concept to convey any deeper meaning. You’d think a movie where a man murders women, specifically women who have been made to become sex workers due to poverty and drug addiction, in order to build his vision of an ideal female form, literally reducing women into objects to be used and discarded at the whim of men, would have something to say. It doesn’t really, unless you count that ending as trying to say something, and more’s the pity. Henenlotter pushing for something beyond the surface level satire and gallows humor would have really pushed this film beyond ‘mildly obscure popcorn flick’ into ‘cult gem’ status.

       Which in the final analysis is how I would have to recommend Frankenhooker. Good enough for a movie night with friends, especially if the beer is flowing, but not funny enough, dark enough, or compelling enough to warrant a return visit. For a similar concept done better (in my opinion, at least), I’d go for Marathon alum Bride of Re-animator, which I believe came out the same year as Frankenhooker. Or any of the hundreds of other Frankenstein-inspired movies that have come out, I guess. Either way, even if Frankenhooker isn’t a must-see movie like Bill Murray claimed, it’s not bad, and you didn’t even have to pay me to say that.

       I wouldn’t mind some money though.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Jacob’s Ladder (1990), directed by Adrian Lyne

   The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Jacob's Ladder", by Rush 

     When making a film about war, or soldiers or what have you, what war you decide to place them in can vastly alter the tone of your movie. If you center your movie around the Civil War, then not only do you get to do an entire theme about racism in America, you have modernity vs tradition, regionalism, all sorts of good stuff. If instead you pick World War II, then not only do you get a clear ‘good vs evil’ moral coupon, but you also get the enduring quality of the human spirit and a message about the dangers of nuclear weapons. If you end up picking the Korean War or, heaven forbid, Vietnam, then pretty much the only card you have to play is ‘war sucks’. Not just because war, in fact, does suck, but because in the history of modern warfare Vietnam has the distinct honor of being the shittiest darn war the United States has ever been a part of. You could make an argument for the equally pointless Iraq War of course, but Vietnam was horribly on pretty much every level. The reasons for the war, the laws forcing citizens to fight said war and the social ostracization for refusing to fight, the horribly bloody conflict itself, the shady-ass bombing of neighboring countries okayed by Nixon and Kissinger and of course the post-war years that saw the streets fill with soldiers who were too traumatized by their experience to live normal lives. Whether your film is about the inhumanity of the war itself, like in Apocalypse Now, Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, or the effect the war had on its soldiers and American society, like in First Blood or Jacob’s Ladder, it’s all a long miserable road to death. So it goes.

      In Jacob’s Ladder, Tim Robbins plays the titular Jacob Singer, a postal worker in New York City, New York. Jake is a Vietnam veteran, currently living with his girlfriend Jezebel after some nebulous issue with his ex-wife, going to work and seeing his chiropractor every once in a while. As far as lives go, it’s not all that bad, could be better. Then the nightmares start happening, and the hallucinations, and Jacob becomes convinced that some malevolent force is coming him. Does Singer’s suspicions hold some weight, or is he just slipping into insanity? And what is is the connection between these events and Singer’s time in Vietnam? Watch and see.

      Nowadays, Jacob’s Ladder is noteworthy for being the artistic inspiration for the famous survival-horror video game series Silent Hill, the next installment of which is actually being done by Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and director Guillermo del Toro. If you have experience with the Silent Hill games, then a lot of the things in this film will seem familiar to you: A protagonist with a traumatic past, disturbing visual imagery, the persistent atmosphere of unease, and even a creepy hospital. While I do find the religious subtext omnipresent within the film on the wrong side of heavy-handed, the freakiness is consistent and finishes in a way you might not expect. If that sounds like something you might be interested in, why not try climbing up Jacob’s Ladder this Halloween?

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Darkman (1990), directed by Sam Raimi

     

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Darkman's Nose", by Monkey3

     Superhero movies are a strange and unwieldy beast. Over the last couple of years, with the enormous success of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, it seems that which was once the domain of nerds and other social misfits has become a multi-million, multi-media success story. Iron Man has three movies, Avengers made a billion dollars, and DC has a hit show about a guy who shoots arrows and isn’t Robin Hood. With this sudden, huge influx of popularity, you’d almost think that the idea of a superhero movie was a new and exciting concept, but of course it’s actually been around for decades. Of those films before the Superhero Boom period, most of the attention is focused on properties owned by either DC or Marvel, Richard Donner’s Superman, Tim Burton’s Batman, Blade, etc., because they’re the ones the most money. There were some pretty good outliers though, and one of them has made this list.

      After having been denied the opportunity to make a film based on either Batman or the Shadow (both of which would get their own movie around the same time), Sam Raimi, director of the popular Evil Dead series, decided in 1990 to release his own original film based on those two popular characters. The result, Darkman, centers around mild-mannered scientist Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson), who is working on perfecting his formula for a revolutionary form of synthetic skin (the current batch only lasts for 99 minutes). When his girlfriend Julie (Frances McDormand) gets her hands on a document that incriminates the CEO of a major company with organized crime, Peyton is targeted by CEO’s gang, tortured and blown up along with his lab. Peyton miraculously survives, but the fires have horribly mutilated him, and the surgery used to save his life has severed his nerve endings, rendering him unable to feel pain (and also super-strength for some reason). His once-peaceful life now irrevocably altered, Westlake decides to use his newfound abilities and synthetic skin to enact brutal and bloody revenge against all the people who had wronged him. So basically the plot to Robocop and The Crow, but with a slightly goofier name attached to it.

      Part Batman, part Phantom of the Opera, Darkman is a movie that walks the line between serious brooding action and camp and occasionally stumbling along the way. But taking ridiculous shit and pretending that it’s serious business is the foundation of comic books, so in that case Raimi created a pretty accurate translation of the medium onto film. It’s not the best on the block, but it has a certain charm to it that I can’t deny, so I give it a thumbs up. If you’re looking for a movie or a costume this Halloween, why not try Darkman?

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Tremors (1990), directed by Ron Underwood

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock)", by The Beach Boys

     There are two films which stick out in my mind as my first brush with horror, way back in the child days. One was Puppet Master, a pure grade B-Movie about a team of psychics being murdered by sentient toys, which still holds a place in my heart today (the 4+ sequels not so much). The other was Tremors, a movie that I had only seen the climax of once as a mischievous kid staying up past his bedtime, but the scene was enough to stick in my mind all these years later. I’ve seen Puppet Master, but up until this point I had never tried to watch Tremors, although I have seen an episode of the short-lived TV series, which was still called Tremors after shifting the entire franchise to a monster-of-the-week format for some reason. For the purposes of this marathon, I decided to go back to Tremors and finally see if the hype was real. Here’s my conclusion:

     Directed by Ron Underwood (which has got to be someone’s porno name) is an action-horror film released back in 1990, the same year as Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane’s Addiction, which isn’t relevant at all. Kevin ‘Six Degrees’ Bacon and Fred Ward star as Valentine and Earl, handymen who live in the city of Perfection in the vague American southwest, a city with a population of about a dozen people. Val and Earl are men with ambitions far greater than Perfection provides, and plans with making their fortune in the big city of Bixby. On the day of their departure however, people start dying, seemingly sucked into the very Earth itself. Upon closer investigation, it turns out that Perfection is now home to strange wormlike creatures named Graboids, that have a lust for human flesh and the ability to tunnel through the dirt like a fish through water. It’s a battle for survival as Val, Earl, their seismologist friend Rhonda and the rest of Perfection try to route these horrible new beasts from their home, before they’re grabbed by the Graboids.

     Were this a more serious movie, you could get a huge amount of mileage on the tension a monster like the Graboids provides. A monster that not only attacks you if touch the ground, but also if you make the slightest bit of noise? Scary as all hell. Honestly,, even though Tremors does make use of some of that tension it seems to drift more towards action and comedy over straight horror, sort of like the tonal shift between Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. Not to say that Tremors is bad, because it’s a fun, goofy little movie that, like Return of the Living Dead or Night of the Creeps, is a monster movie that pokes fun at monster movies. If that’s the kind of movie you’re looking for this Halloween, why not give it a try?

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Bride of Re-animator (1990), directed by Brian Yuzna

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Found Love In a Graveyard", by Veronica Falls

     I have gone on record multiple times with friends in real life and on the internet that Re-animator is a fantastic and under appreciated movie in the horror genre, one that is specifically labeled as ‘awesome’ in my internal movie database. Released in 1985, the film Re-animator was an adaptation of a short story by H.P. Lovecraft : “Herbert West-Reanimator”, focusing on a morally-deficient and slightly unstable medical student who creates a serum designed prevent death and bring anything that was dead back to life, which it does...mostly. Featuring some juicy gore, great make-up and special effects and an undercurrent of black comedy enhancing the overall insanity, it’s a film that works incredibly well with what’s trying to accomplish and indulges in all the right places. It’s an excessive but not extravagant movie, and were this under different circumstances I might have wrote about this one instead. I still recommend it though, and if you are going to watch this movie you’re probably better off watching Re-animator first, because it sets up a lot of the things for the sequel. So there are SPOILERS about the original film in this upcoming paragraph, be aware.

     8 months after the events of Re-animator, and Herbert West (played by Jeffrey Combs, who is fucking great in this role) and his friend/accomplice Dan Cain are in hiding in South America after being connected to the mass killing that happened in the last film. Dan is in dire straits psychologically, a combination of the hideous nature of his work and the fact that said work lead to the death of his girlfriend wreaking havoc on his psyche. West, being the good friend/mad scientist that he is, proposes a seemingly perfect solution: Dan’s girlfriend may be gone, so why not build a new one, a perfect girlfriend with all the best parts a man could find. So begins a new cycle of murder, subterfuge and suspense for Herbert West and Dan Cain, one with even more gruesome experiments, dirty deeds and talking heads (not David Byrne, even though that would’ve been awesome) than ever before.

     It’s no coincidence that Bride of Re-animator holds a similar name to Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to the 1931 Universal classic. Both films involve resurrecting a woman of course, but more than that both films are markedly more bizarre than the films they succeed, and in both cases I think it affects the overall narrative negatively. In Bride of Frankenstein I believe it’s not too much of a detriment (maybe James Whale directing both had something to do with that, but I can’t say for sure), but in Bride of Re-animator there’s so much insane crap going on that the focus is on the insane crap rather than telling a coherent story. It’s awesome to look at all the crazy special effects they pull off with West’s creations, but most everything else takes a step down in my opinion. Sort of like the progression from Evil Dead to Evil Dead II, but Evil Dead II was the superior film in that case, so maybe I’m a hypocrite in this case. I don’t know.

     So, not as good as Re-animator, but as far as sequels go I’d say Bride does a pretty good job of establishing a end to the storyline, even if the third film that came out years later kind of mucked that up. As a standalone film it’s a delightfully gory, incredibly surreal and slightly messy (plot-wise) experience. After you check out Re-animator, why not putting this on your Halloween film queue?

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: Hardware (1990), directed by Richard Stanley

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Electric Head, pt. 1 & 2", by White Zombie

     If any of you out there followed the Marathon, you might remember me dedicated a spot on the list for a film called Lost Soul. Rather than your typical horror/sci-fi/fantasy fare that usually populates this list, this was a documentary, detailing the brief rise and precipitous fall of director Richard Stanley. A rising star of the early 90s in the horror movie world, Stanley had the money, the names (Marlon ‘Double Quarter Pounder’ Brando just for starters) and the crew when he started his third major motion picture: A then-modern day adaptation of the H.G. Wells’ classic ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’, featuring some incredibly impressive and incredibly ambitious art design and costuming. Unfortunately, the project was plagued with issues from the very start; money problems, location problems, Val Kilmer, and what was originally Richard Stanley’s epic sci-fi vision eventually became the infamous flop where Marlon Brando palled around with the prototype Mini Me. Much like Jodorowsky’s Dune, Lost Soul revels in the concept of ‘what could have been’ and pointing a finger at the oppressive studio heads who crush the artist’s creative vision, while managing to actually provide some interesting insight on the filmmaking process and the problems that arise when it comes to big studio productions. I recommended it back then, I’d still recommend it now.

     Even since I finished the piece on Lost Soul way back when, I’ve had this desire to check out the films that had allowed Stanley to pursue Moreau with such confidence, that is to say Hardware and Dust Devil. In fact I had even considered putting it in the Marathon along with Lost Soul, ultimately deciding against it for the purposes of variety. Which means that it’s totally fine to do it now, it being a new year and new Marathon and all. Starting from the beginning seemed the best place to start, so that means 1990’s Hardware.

     Sometime in the far future, at a point in time where technology only looks marginally more advanced than it was in the 90s, the United States has officially gone to shit. Nuclear attacks have left most of the major cities in ruins, leaving to radiation poisoned survivors to try and rebuild their lives from the scrap left behind. We are at war with an unknown enemy, which apparently isn't going all that well. The government is enacting what they are calling ‘population control’ laws, where citizens are being forced to choose between being sterilized or going hungry. Iggy Pop is a radio DJ, which is pretty cool, but other than that it’s pretty bad.

     It is in this harsh world that Moses, our protagonist and all-around bland dude, gets a great deal on some parts that once belonged to a maintenance droid before it wandered into a local minefield. The plan is to give them to his estranged girlfriend Jill, who splits her time between moping about how shitty life is and making very pointy, very industrial sculptures about how shitty life is, in the hopes of making them less estranged. The thing is, and this is the silly part, those robot parts aren’t from a maintenance droid. They’re from a device called the M.A.R.K.-13, an intelligent and adaptive war machine developed by the U.S. Military, built to destroy any and all human life within its zone of operations. Which can be anywhere it damn well pleases as it turns out, because it’s not long before its discovery that it manages to reactivate itself and start carrying out that whole ‘merciless slaughter’ thing. If plain old life was a struggle in this bombed-out shit heap, Moses and Jill are about to find out just how much harder it is when you throw killer robots in the mix.

     Looking at Hardware, you can recognize immediately why people were hyping up Stanley from the get-go. The man knows how to construct a unique and interesting looking world. The majority of the film takes place in Jill’s spacious studio apartment (how overpopulation is such a big deal yet an artist on welfare can afford a place like that in the city is beyond me), yet there are so many touches throughout the film that help to define Stanley’s vision of his universe. Jill’s N.I.N. chic, the constant updates by Angry Bob/Iggy Pop, their bizarre TV shows, the strobe lighting that comes and goes at a moment’s notice, it’s like a peek at the music video that ran through every grunge kid’s head back in the day. Considering Richard Stanley directed music videos before his move to theatrical films, maybe this isn’t all that surprising. But it is still hip.

     Also worth noting, the M.A.R.K.-13 itself, which was an actual machine constructed for the film. I don’t know how easy it was for Stanley to even get that shit to work halfway decently, but it pays off when it actually comes into play in the film. An actor in a suit probably wouldn’t be able to convey the same sense of ‘other’ that the MARK-13 does at its best. Keep it in low lighting, don’t show it wheeling around under its own power that much, and it makes for a suitably impressive movie monster in spite of its Johnny 5 type design.

     The problem that plagues Hardware though is the same problem that plague the films of another well-known music video alum, Zack Snyder: Under the impressive visuals, it’s just not good. Up its own ass even, packed in with a bunch of symbolism that I’m sure would look pretty good in the more visually focused world of music videos, but comes off as a bit pretentious here. Especially when you consider the fact that Hardware is really just the standard slasher formula gussied up to make it seem more ‘alternative’. The hot actress still survives, the perverts and the minorities are still killed off, all leading up to a climactic showdown between the hot chick and the monster at the end, it’s all by the books kind of stuff but presented with this aloof attitude. Like yeah, we know that Moses is an underdeveloped, rather blandly performed character, yeah Moses and Jill the entirety of their time as a ‘couple’ moping and arguing with each other, yeah barely any of the characters feel fleshed out and we try to push the message of hope and nihilism at the same time, but that’s real life! Sorry that you don’t get it, so why don’t you go back to watching Saved by the Bell reruns in your unripped jeans, you fucking square?! Stop being so mainstream, you’re embarrassing yourself.

     Horror movies are a genre that pride themselves on visual design and special effects, and in that regard Hardware deserves a watch, because Richard Stanley shows a level of creativity and inventiveness not often seen in the industry today. However, I literally could not keep my eyes on the screen for the first 40 or so minutes of the film, and gorehounds out there might be underwhelmed by the relatively low body count, so be sure to keep that in mind. In the end, Hardware shows a lot of promise, but due to some glaring issues ultimately fails to capitalize on its enormous potential. Much like Richard Stanley himself, if Lost Soul is anything to go by.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- Nightbreed (1990), directed by Clive Barker

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Monster", by Kanye West

     If any of you out there remember last year’s Marathon list, and I know I don’t, you might remember a little film by the name of Hellraiser. You know, guy finds a magic puzzle box that opens a doorway to Cthulu’s creepy sex dungeon, loses his skin and then Pinhead gets very non-consensual with everyone involved. Well you might also recall that said film was written and directed by noted horror writer Clive Barker, who combined the supernatural with freaky sex stuff long before ‘50 Shades of Grey’. While he’s never had the reach of Stephen King, Clive Barker was definitely the young rebel badass of the paperback novel game in the day, especially after the success of 1987’s Hellraiser and its’ subsequent enfranchisement. It was the success of that movie, one of the few films that was written, directed, and adapted from the same person, that no doubt gave the studio heads the confidence to fund his next directorial work, whenever that day would arrive. Three years later, we got Nightbreed.

     I’m pretty sure the only one that really understands the story in Nightbreed is Clive Barker, but I’ll try to give the shortened version for those interested. Aaron Boone is an average white Canadian, with an average white Canadian girlfriend named Laurie, who apparently has bizarre dreams that pertain to a city called Midian, wherein monsters live, and also gruesome murders for some reason. Turns out these murders aren’t dreams but reality, committed by his psychiatrist Dr. Dekker, who manipulates to get Boone murdered by the fuzz. However, before Boone dies he finds out that Mideon really does exist, populated by a race of monsters known as the Nightbreed. Being a Nightbreed is supposedly super cool according to Boone, so he's super psyched when he gets to come back from the dead and join up with these ugly bastards in their underground city. All good things come to an end though, and when Laurie ends up in Mideon searching for Boone’s missing corpse, it sets off a chain of events that spells bad roads ahead for the Nightbreed.

     So onto the positives… well, much like Event Horizon, Nightbreed does not skimp when it comes to art design and special effects. If you were a big fan of the Cenobites back in Hellraiser, then you’ll be pleased to find out that Clive Barker has doubled down on bloody gore and weird monsters this time around. Nightbreed might be worth it just for the scene where Laurie makes her way through Mideon, and we get to see all the Nightbreed in their natural habitat. Just the range of creatures that we get to see is impressive, all unique, all gruesome in their own special way. If you remember the scene in Star Wars where Luke and Obi-Wan step into the cantina for the first time, and it’s just a sea of aliens, aliens that don’t look like humans with pointy ears even, it's a bit like that. Only spoooooooky.

     Also worth noting, Danny Elfman does the score for this film. Now I’m big Elfman fan, whether it’s his film work or Oingo Boingo, but I don’t think it really works out Nightbreed. By the end it’s more-or-less, but when you got a scene where some dude literally rips his scalp off of his head and that goth circus march comes barreling in, it just doesn’t fit the tone that a scene of that nature is meant to convey. At least in my opinion. Maybe I just associate Elfman’s music too closely with Tim ‘Hot Topic’ Burton, and his movies never move beyond ‘morbidly quirky’.

     As for the cons, I feel like it’s more efficient to make a list:

• This film is was adapted from a novel known as ‘Cabal’, which was also written by Barker. In that book, I imagine the story is coherent, the plot logical and well-defined, and the audience isn’t left in the dark about what the character’s are thinking. Not so for Nightbreed, the film where no one knows anything, and the ones who might know won’t explain it. At least not in a way that really makes sense. Storywriting gold right there. 

• I watched the director’s cut edition, as that was the version available on netflix, and it’s reminded me why author and editor are generally separate positions. CHRIST this is a long winded movie, 45 minutes left to go and I was actively searching for anything to do other than to continue watching, and this was literally the most action-packed section of the film. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly was a 2+ hour long movie, but it never feels like two hours have passed, because there is actually stuff going on on the screen that is interesting to watch. Maybe their is an inherent quality to the movie that’s lost between the theatrical cut and the director’s, and maybe we wouldn’t get to see as many cool monsters in the theatrical release, but as long as it didn’t feel like I was waiting for a damn bus I’d be okay with it. 

• Sure there are plenty of tits in Nightbreed, but it never feels quite as gory as you would expect from a pre-CGI horror movie. Don’t get me wrong, I said the special effects are great and they are great, but it never quite hits the levels of ‘what the fuck am I looking at here’ that you got with Hellraiser. I don’t mean to blow smoke up that movie’s ass either, but c’mon, there’s a whole scene where we see a guy regenerate from a puddle of blood into a skinless freak almost step-by step. That’s something that sticks with you. 

• Here’s something else that Nightbreed has in common with Event Horizon: shit characterization. Unlike EH however, where you didn’t care about the characters because they were too bland, here you don’t care about the characters because they’re one-dimensional props that feel more at home in your local internet fan fiction than in a Hollywood movie written by a famous author. Boone is the proto-Edward Cullen, Laurie’s entire existence revolves around her relationship (spoiler alert: she literally kills herself when she thinks Boone is leaving her, which is about as ‘high-school girl’ as you can fucking get), and every single cop is a violently sadistic stupid piece of shit. None of them are realistic, or at realistic as you get in horror movies, none of them act like humans would, it’s all too exaggerated and up its own ass to be relatable. It’s not that huge a leap from Hellraiser to Nightbreed admittedly, you can tell immediately that they’re written by the same guy, but Nightbreed manages to make Hellraiser look like Taxi Driver by comparison. The smaller cast probably helped in that regard. Hellraiser seems like an isolated incident in that world, in Nightbreed the world is apparently populated by extras from Troma. 

     With all that said, I don’t think I can recommend Nightbreed as a film you should see. Yes the special effects and costumes are great, and it’s offbeat enough that it’s probably managed to form a substantial cult following based solely on that. However, it’s also really, really dumb and really, really slow, and all the great monster designs in the world can’t cover up the fact that watching Nightbreed more of a chore than it was entertainment. If you want to give it a shot yourself then more power to you, but I think there are far darker and far better movies out there that deserve your attention than Boone’s Wacky Canadian Monster Adventures. Some of which we might even get to on this year’s Marathon, if you can believe it. I know I don’t.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: Predator 2 (1990), directed by Stephen Hopkins

     Another year has gone by, and that means it’s time to watch some weird movies for Halloween! This year, I’ve endeavored to not only pick movies that I’ve wanted to see, but also films that capture that fantastical tone that we associate so strongly with this holiday for the strange. Fantasy, sci-fi, adventure, even some dark comedies thrown in for good measure, all of them viewed by me for the very first time. Some I can’t praise enough, some I struggle to praise at all, but I wouldn’t change a thing about it (especially since I’m so lazy). So here’s a smattering of the films on display this year; take a look, critique it if you want, tell me how much a fucking idiot I am for not liking the movies you like, but above all I fervently hope you pick one of these movies to watch that you’ve never seen before. That’s why I’ve constructed this list, and it’s why I review the movies that I do, so that you guys out there might find something new that you can enjoy or that inspires you in your own creative work.

Happy Halloween!

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Welcome To The Jungle", by Guns N' Roses

     Although the Predator has arguably never enjoyed the cultural or artistic significance that other sci-fi horror films of that era have enjoyed, Alien, The Thing, the Star Wars Christmas Special, it’s certainly carved its own place in pop culture. Video games, comic books (including three different instances of Batman vs. Predator), novels and a series of mostly subpar films, some of which include the xenomorphs from Alien, another franchise that could be considered generally shit. Of course even the most shameless of franchises have a grain of good in them; Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens are certainly well-favored in the public eye, Halloween Part 1 & Part 2, Batman & Batman Returns, and although I wouldn’t say it’s a fantastic film, Predator is at least an entertaining and competently made one. But what of its sequel, 1990’s Predator 2? Is it a Terminator 2, or a Cars 2? Does it make for a great Halloween movie? Only I can say for sure.

     So the first Predator is a pretty simple premise, but in case you’re somehow incapable of watching it or looking it up yourself, here it is: Sometime in the radical 1980s, a paramilitary group led by ‘Dutch’ Schaefer are engaged in some work in the jungles of South America where they are stalked and systematically killed by an extraterrestrial hunter (some might say a predator). While thematically it’s pretty much just a slasher flick filled with guns and latent homoeroticism, there are a couple of things about Predator that manage to make it interesting. First off all, it has a great cast: Carl ‘Apollo Creed’ Weathers, Jesse ‘Sexual Tyrannosaurus’ Ventura, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the lead, in the prime of his 80s Action God days. Secondly, the design of the Predator alien and his weapons are quite interesting to look at, and the effects concerning his vision and his cloaking device are pretty cool as well. Finally, the movie is pretty damn violent at times, and if you happen to be a bit of a gorehound like I am, you’ll find something to like there. In a lot of ways Predator is the beefcake version of Alien, which is probably why the idea of the two properties collaborating has always been intriguing, if not properly executed. Then again, every single versus movie ever made has failed to meet expectations, so that’s not surprising.

     Following in the footsteps of Aliens and Judgement Day, Predator attempts to be bigger and better while still retaining the core concept of what made the original film work. Instead of the steaming jungles of South America, our film takes place in the ‘urban jungle’ of Los Angeles in the then far-off year of 1997, a Demolition Man-esque warzone between the L.A.P.D and the textbook definition of what White America apparently thought inner-city gangs were back in the 90’s (paganistic, barely coherent and constantly under the influence of drugs as they fire off assault weapons? I don’t know how anyone could possibly be offended). Rather than buff action hero Schwarzenegger, we get Michael Harrigan (Danny Glover), a renegade cop who plays by nobody’s rules but his own, who is stalked by an all-new all-deadly Predator. You’ve got Gary Busey as a shady government agent, voodoo sacrifices, weed, Bill Paxton, and the macho Latina chick that seemed to be a prerequisite in these kinds of movies. Maybe there wasn’t a truck vs helicopter fight going on, but it was definitely a ‘bigger’ movie than Predator.

     However, there are some problems. Although Predator 2 seems to be attempting some biting social commentary (gang violence, exploitative media, culture of fear) it comes off less a Robocop or Dawn of the Dead type satire than it does a Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Also, despite there being plenty of action, and thus an appropriate amount of death, the movie seems rather muted when it comes to violence. Compared to the original film, which had arms blowing off, graphic depictions of skinned bodies and such, the killings in the sequel seem rather tame in comparison, if they’re even on screen at all Not to say there offscreen deaths can’t be valid in a dramatic sense, but this ain’t the 50s anymore and sometimes a punch in the face can hurt just as much as one to the back of the head. I don’t know if it was censorship imposed by the studio/ratings board that caused it or if that was just the way it came out, but once you see it you can’t unsee it. If we’re already going with the idea that a slightly overweight cop can fight a 7 ft tall homicidal alien just as well as Arnold ‘Terminator the Barbarian’ Schwarzenegger, something that can eviscerate a room full of coked up gang members with machine guns without getting a scratch, then I want some visceral death scenes. You pushing the underdog story? Then you make sure the audience knows just how much of an underdog the protagonist really is.

     Even taking its flaws into account, Predator 2 is a fairly entertaining movie, and I can appreciate the way it expanded upon the lore of the Predators themselves. Between the two I’d still say Predator is the better film, mostly because it’s the more straightforward film, not bogged down by the ridiculous stuff that plagues its descendent. If you’ve seen the first movie last Halloween and you’re wondering whether you should try the sequel, I’d say you’ll probably find something to enjoy this year. Watch out for anything beyond that though, especially the Alien vs. Predator films. You may not survive.