God Hates Stupid Children!

So here we are, the triumphant return of VHS Fridays. First tape off the top of the pile was Doug Jackson’s 1994 thriller The Paperboy.

Weirdo twelve-year-old Johnny (Marc Marut) goes to increasingly homicidal lengths to make his neighbour Melissa (Alexandra Thorpe) his new mommy.

The Paperboy was watchable, but fairly mediocre fare. It had the air of a TV movie – it didn’t surprise me to see most of Jackson’s credits were in that medium – and sadly not as memorable as his two previous efforts that I recall from my video store days, Whispers & Deadbolt. And as far as vintage Cancon, it did not make me nearly as giddy as my revelatory viewing of The Kiss last fall.

That’s not to say that The Paperboy doesn’t have its moments. It escalated immediately with an old lady being plastic bagged quicker than Lynne Griffin in Black Christmas. and did chuckle during the Mr. Furley moment when Melissa overhears Johnny playing with her daughter...

And perhaps most impressive was that he was able to order a doll from the mid-nineties version of the Web and have it delivered the next day!

Marut did a decent job playing the piece-of-shit kid. His tantrums were wince inducing, and I suppose that was the point. I was a bit confused about his plan though. It was unclear at times about whether he wanted a mother or a girlfriend. If it really was the former – and he wasn’t so impulsive and unhinged – he could have just gone the easy route and tried to set up his lonely father with her. There you go, bonkers Brady Bunch complete! But that seemingly inflammable William Katt had to swoop in and ruin EVERYTHING!

Marc Marut as Johnny in The Paperboy

I was happy to see Frances Bay show up, but when I saw her carrying Chekhov's inhaler I sadly knew she’d die in the third act. I think my only strain on believability - apart from someone actually screaming Ow! as they got knocked out – was that Melissa would put up with Johnny's antics for so long. Sure, she’s a teacher with the patience of a saint, but it was stretched to the extreme. The second she found out Johnny killed her mother she should have been beating his ass Naomi Watts/Vera Farmiga I’m-not-your-fucking-mommy style.

The Paperboy doesn’t possess the darkness of Mikey – which Imdb says this was a remake of not two years later??? – nor the polish of The Good Son, but as far as killer kid movies go, you could do worse.

Pit, Man.

Last Thursday, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the indispensable film archive Canuxpliotation.com, the Laser Blast Film Society screened the 1981 Canadian classic The Pit at The Royal. My love of this film is no secret and I was super chuffed to see it on the big screen.

Fortunately, there were others with artistic skills just as excited and they fashioned stuff for the event.

Poster art by Justin Cozens

Cards designed by Keenan Tamblyn

It was a terrific night of wacko Canadian film appreciation.

A Little Bundle of Cohen.

With the recent passing of genre giant Larry Cohen, this week's title is his first horror film, 1974's It's Alive.

The birth of the Davies' second child brings them nothing but pain and suffering when it turns out to be murdering mutant. And it's loose in Los Angeles!

Had to spring for VOD on this one, as I do not own the VHS sadly. It's Alive was another title I thought I'd seen as a kid, but realized pretty early on that was not the case. I guess my memory of the baby's POV tearing through an operating room must have been from one of the sequels. No matter.

I could certainly see that this was Cohen's earliest foray into horror as it possessed a more deliberate pace than his later efforts. The ones I grew up with, specifically Q & The Stuff, have more grandeur and larger scope. When looking at his work as a whole, you can see his progression as a filmmaker.

Sharon Farrell & John P. Ryan in It's Alive.

Now, that's not to say there isn't a shitload of personality in this movie. John P. Ryan (who always played the villain in the movies of my youth like Avenging Force and Class of 1999) had some terrific moments, including some odd banter with a Scottish nurse and his choice to smoke & chew gum at the same time. How? Why? And don't even get me started on the cops.

It's Alive existed in a weird universe that seemed to over-react to the situation at hand. A mutant baby escaped from the hospital and somehow it's the parent's fault, as the father lost his job and the mother was loaded up with pills. Even the press seemed to be on their back, naming the couple in the news before the blood was even dry.

I did like how the creature itself was handled. It was a gradual reveal, using shadow and blurred lenses to start, and even some body suit work in its most effective moments. The puppetry was obviously more rudimentary than what we'd get from gore guru Rick Baker in the decades to come, but the sound design made up for it in spades. Throw in a solid score from legend Bernard Herrmann and you've got an inherently watchable flick, if maybe not as colourful as Cohen's later collaborations with Michael Moriarty.

Also, now that I've read that the baby was modelled after the Starchild in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, that's all I can fucking see now!

The Adventures of Jamie & Teddy

With the seventh edition of the Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Fest now underway, it seems to appropriate to spool up something from the Great White North. This week’s VHS is Lew Lehman’s 1981 flick The Pit.

When awkward twelve-year-old Jamie (Sammy Snyders) discovers several “Trolologs” in a hole in the forest, he goes to increasingly grisly lengths to keep them fed.

The Pit is such a wonderfully strange movie. Having discovered it during my video store jockey days, it’s really the gift that keeps on giving in that not only do you have a weirdo kid – or “funny person” as one of his tormentors calls him – who talks to his teddy bear, but also carnivorous monsters in the woods. It’s also a bit unusual in that it’s a Canadian production, mostly shot in Wisconsin (the interior pit sequences were done in Toronto according to Imdb) because it’s often the other way around.

Snyders puts in a terrific off-kilter performance as Jamie and considering how bizarre the script must have read, I’m always impressed by how much he committed to it. It would’ve been so easy to go over the top, but he plays everything so matter-of-fact. Sadly, The Pit was one of the last things he did before leaving the biz.

Sammy Snyders as Jamie in The Pit

I find Jamie such an interesting subject because he’s clearly a bit off, but not what I would consider evil in the sense we usually see in killer kid flicks. Sure, he’s feeding people to his “pets”, but when you take into account a good majority of the meat were either bullies or just mean folk, it’s sometimes hard not to root for him. He’s weird as fuck to be sure and his obsession with naked ladies probably would’ve escalated, but he ain’t straight up Children of the Corn is what I’m saying.

Also, his babysitter Sandy (Jeannie Elias) may have left her guide book at home. What was she was thinking when she, after being expressly told that Jamie is susceptible to crushes, decides to a) wash Jamie’s back in the tub and b) backpedal when she says she has a boyfriend – “Well, he isn't really what you'd call a boyfriend, he's just a friend.” WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK ARE YOU DOING?

Mind you, this ill-advised behaviour does fall in line with the bonkers tone of the piece. Laughing out loud as Jamie pushes an old lady in a wheelchair through a field to her doom is inevitable, but watching him blackmail his neighbour into undressing at her front window, not so much. I beg to differ with the Sheriff who exclaimed he moved to this town because nothing ever happens.

If there was a critique of The Pit, it would be the pacing, as things come in fits and starts, most noticeably when the opening sequence is replayed (in its entirety I might add) later in the picture. It could also be accused of going on a little too long. After the movie reaches its logical conclusion the narrative completely abandons Jamie for like fifteen minutes, while it turns into Humanoids From The Deep. I’m not going to complain too much, as it was clearly an attempt to add more gore and nudity, but having a bunch of hicks hunt down the Trolologs only served to shine a empathetic light on them. I also want to take this opportunity to give it up for those hairy dudes because they ruled.

I love this movie, but every time I watch it I am always left wondering… What happened to Teddy? A throwaway scene suggested that Teddy was actually sentient so I’ve always wondered what happened to him after Jamie left to play with his new friend, Alicia.

Sequel anyone?

Short of the Week #10

A short I caught at Fantasia last year has recently found its way online. Without further ado, here is Jessica Curtright & Santiago C. Tapia's short film It Began Without Warning.

There's some definite Who Can Kill A Child? vibes here, but I love the weird turn it takes about halfway through. When you watch as many shorts I as do, you find that more often than not they overstay their welcome. It Began however, is one of those rare instances where I was left wanting more. It was subtitled Phase 1 so who knows? Maybe there is more to come.

A Girl & Her Doll

This week I checked out my VHS of Eddy Matalon's 1977 killer kid vehicle Cathy's Curse.

A young girl (Randi Allen) becomes possessed by the ghost of her aunt after her family moves into their ancestral home.

Shot in Quebec, this Canadian-French co-production definitely has a European feel to it that I chalk up to the French-born director Matalon. His influences were apparent, as I could pick out sequences from other movies (The Omen & Don't Look Now being two examples) in amongst his own muddled vision.

I could blame my VHS cut, but it seemed like there were a lot of problems with continuity and editing in this film with scenes often ending just a few shots too soon. Cathy's Curse could also be accused of being a bit lax in the logic department where very obvious supernatural happenings seem to be forgotten by characters from scene to scene. 

Randi Allen in Cathy's Curse.

My daughter just miraculously teleported around the room! Huh. Maybe I'm just not getting enough sleep. Or that doll just ripped up my hand, man I gotta lay off the booze... Speaking of booze, that drinking scene with the “butler” - if you thought the spider attack scene in The Beyond was random, you ain't seen nothing yet!

Cathy's Curse has some serious whiteboard syndrome going on here – meaning creepy scenes were spit-balled and inserted in without any thought given to context or continuity. It worked for Lucio Fulci, but not so much here mainly due to it not being accompanied by buckets of gore. I suppose there was the scene where the kid was wearing the butler's face... I mean, I think she was. It was hard to tell. She looked more like a reject from Lenzi's Nightmare City.

Who wore it better?

All this aside, the cast was pretty decent. Beverly Murray as the mother was supposed to be losing it, so I can forgive her overacting and Alan Scarfe's resemblance to nineties David Hewlett was super distracting to me. Again, it may have been by faded VHS playing tricks on me. Randi Allen was actually very good as the title character. She's got the evil glower down as well as the delivery of some off-colour language. Seeing her call an old woman a “fat dried up whore” was delightful. I admit it's not Regan level nastiness, but we are in Canada after all, gosh darn it.

Overall, Cathy's Curse was a little on the dull side, but it was still mildly amusing CanCon.

Bless The Child

On Saturday, Blood in the Snow screened two creepy kid flicks, the first of which being Jennifer Phillips' debut effort, Blood Child.

After suffering a miscarriage in Singapore, Ashley (Alyx Melone) with the help of her maid Siti (Cynthia Lee MacQuarrie) make a pact with a witch doctor to bring forth a “ghost child”. But as time goes by, it becomes increasingly difficult to control, especially when Ashley becomes pregnant again.

I am hoping that Phillips is the beginning of a new cycle of bringing lesser known South East Asian folklore to the West (much like up-and-comer Larica Pereira did with her short film Tik-Tik last year). I found the whole concept of the ghost child fascinating, especially when Phillips explained at the Q&A that this is an actual practice in Singapore. When not filtered through the lens of a studio (like say last year's The Forest), delving into these customs comes off as a lot more sincere.

Alyx Melone as Ashley in Blood Child.

Blood Child was definitely at its strongest when it was dwelling on its lore. It was when Phillips fell back on generic horror conventions – and the usual trappings and logic gaps that plague these kind of supernatural thrillers – that it was less interesting to me. I liked it well enough though, even if it did end rather abruptly in a manner I wasn't crazy about.

Something I found unique was the pairing of the housewife and the maid. In most horror films, the maid would be played as an antagonist, but this duo were intrinsically linked by the pact they had made. Cynthia Lee MacQuarrie accomplished a lot with very little dialogue beyond “yes ma'am” and I spent most of the film trying to place why the lead Alyx Melone seemed so familiar. It finally dawned on me that she possessed both the looks of fellow Canuck Tristan Risk and the mannerisms of Heather Lankenkamp. Everyone else in the film just seemed to be circling in an ineffectual orbit around these two the whole film.

Cast & crew of Blood Child. Photo courtesy of Joe MK.

I think the core of Blood Child, built around its compelling folk tale and two strong leads, was solid, even if some of the interstitials fell flat at times. I'm all for the effort though. We need an infusion of new things that go bump in the night beyond the usual revolving door of CGI apparitions, flesh eaters and dudes in animal masks.

Trailer Tuesdays: The Bad Seed

Today's trailer is for a film that I saw for the first time just last week (courtesy of Richelle Charkot's killer screening series Retropath at the Royal) Mervyn's LeRoy's The Bad Seed from 1956.

I enjoyed this movie a lot. Its origins as a play made for a very contained story that relied on dialogue and character, two things I appreciate very much. I always assumed declarations like “when you see it we will appreciate your not divulging its startling climax” were things that films of this era just said arbitrarily. But no, this film means it.

After the movie seemed like it ended twice, I thought little Rhoda was gonna go all Halloween II, but nope! Instead, the movie hits you with one of the biggest WTF endings I've seen in quite a while.

Trailer Tuesdays: Heavenly Creatures

On the subject of young girls tragically separated from reality, I give you the trailer for Peter Jackson's 1994 opus Heavenly Creatures.

Beware The Slenderman

The other film I saw at this year’s Hot Docs was Irene Taylor Brodsky's Beware the Slenderman.

In 2014, in an attempt to appease a fictional character named The Slenderman, twelve-year-olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their friend Payton Leutner into the Wisconsin woods and stabbed her repeatedly.

First surfacing on the humour website Something Awful in 2009, Slenderman has become the Internet’s biggest urban legend, inspiring short films, art and online fiction. Though the doc's title may suggest that this documentary is an exploration of the Slenderman myth, it's really more of a true crime investigation. Brodsky had already begun work on a documentary that investigated how the Internet affects how we view the world when the story broke, so that explains how she managed to be there filming those involved in the case almost immediately after the incident.

The most chilling parts of the documentary are the videotaped confessions of Geyser and Weier. I say confessions even though at some points they were speaking to detectives as nonchalantly as if they were ordering coffee at Starbucks. It was legitimately shocking to see how divorced from reality they were. Somehow, they had worked it into their heads that to become the Slenderman's “proxies”, they had to kill their friend. If they didn’t, he would come after them and their families.

There's another frustrating angle to this case, in how law enforcement initially handled things. During their first few hours in police custody, the parents still thought their children were missing and interviews were conducted in complete secrecy. I mean, how is it possible that a twelve-year-old can be interrogated without some sort of counsel present?

I've been ingesting a lot of stories about people trying to prove their innocence recently (Making A Murderer, Serial) so it was a eye-opener to see the other side of the scale. Though, regardless of the obvious guilt in this case, you still have to ask yourself how something like this happens. I know Geyser and Weier parents are. Brodsky talks to them a lot (the victim and her family declined to be interviewed for the doc) and I feel for them. They were not neglectful parents. In fact, all signs point to them providing perfectly stable environments.

Brodsky describes the circumstances as a “perfect storm.” They were two impressionable kids that together created a kind of psychological dead zone. Judging from their testimonies of the hours leading up to the incident, it almost seems like neither wanted to actually go through with, but neither would back down. It’s all very tragic. Ultimately, the real victim here is Payton Leutner. She was stabbed nineteen times, but still managed to survive. She’ll have to live with the trauma her entire life, one that by some miracle she still has.

Beware the Slenderman illicited several responses, but chief among them is sadness. Lives have been forever changed. The detrimental effects of our increasingly connected society is a discussion for another day, but it was an undeniable factor here. Beware indeed.

Evil Things Come In Small Packages.

For those of you that haven't been following the Loose Cannons podcast, their newest episode marks the entrance into Cannon Films' golden age – the eighties. Cannon's first project of the decade was Gabrielle Beaumont's The Godsend, for which I watched for today's edition of VHS Fridays.

After Alan (Malcolm Stoddard) & Kate (Cyd Hayman) find themselves caring for an abandoned baby, their family is visited by tragedy after tragedy. Could their adopted daughter be the cause?

So, there's really no way around it. This felt like a diluted knock-off of 1976's The Omen. While it is true the book by Bernard Taylor on which The Godsend was based came out that same year, it's difficult to deny that it wasn't influenced heavily by the Richard Donner classic. They both share many of the same beats, but The Godsend goes for subtlety over its more colourful counterpart, thus being noticeably less interesting as a result.

The movie begins almost instantly with a strange pregnant woman (Angela Pleasance, daughter of Donald) being invited into the unsuspecting family's home. Then, no sooner than you can say placenta, she's dropped a fetus and peaced out. Pleasance's performance was such I couldn't decide whether it was creepy or awkward. She had this weird thousand-yard stare and the way she moved around made me think at one point her character was supposed to be blind. Anyway, the couple seemed to be immediately on board with keeping this thing, even though they already had four (yes, FOUR) kids. And, that included two gingers and another baby. What a fucking nightmare! I mean, that is literally a horror movie right there, am I right? And that's even before “Bonnie” started knocking them off.

Angela Pleasance as The Strang-- Can you please stop looking at me like that??

So, the children started dying in mysterious ways and only the last daughter remained before the father started to clue in. The mother was completely blinded by love, despite her tripping over her daughter's doll – losing yet another child – and her husband left sterile from contracting the mumps (who knew that was a thing?) and continued to think everything was hunky-dory. Kate was really good at compartmentalizing grief, I'll give her that.

The father pretty much does everything short of killing his evil orphan, but she always seems to be in the right spot when anyone is precariously leaning over a high drop. I mean, seriously, after one or two of your siblings drop, you think you'd be a bit more wary of your surroundings.

#FatherFail

As a horror film, the subject matter was familiar, but sadly most of the bad stuff happened offscreen. We certainly don't get anything as ace as someone getting their head sheared off by a plate of glass, so the proceedings were rather less than. I will say, however, that the girls (Wilhelmina Green & Joanne Boorman) they got to play Bonnie at various ages could glower with the best of them.

I wouldn't put this in the upper echelon of killer kid movies, but it was still fairly well put together, and Alan's attempts to convince Kate their daughter was evil were pretty hilarious in a did-you-really-think-this-would-work kind of way.

I have a solution. Don't have kids. Problem solved. The End.

Trailer Tuesdays: Children of the Corn

It's funny how stuff sticks in your brain. It's been almost thirty years since I've watched Fritz Kiersch's adaptation of Children of the Corn, but I immediately recognized it during its random appearance on Scream Queens a few weeks ago.

I suppose it is maybe not so surprising. Considering my formative years coincided with the home video boom, it was rare that I didn't watch a rented tape more than once and Corn was smack dab in that time period. Of course, little did I know that the tagline “an adult nightmare” might as well have been code for “hey kiddo, you're gonna grow up to be an office drone.”

Maybe if I'd known that, I'd have built a cross for myself and made like The Blue Man. But, I digress.

Netflix Pix 10.0

There were a few notable horror titles recently added to Netflix North, so I figured this lazy Friday would be a good time to showcase a few of them.

This is a film from a few years ago that sadly flew under the radar. Jamie Collet-Solla (before becoming Liam Neeson's action partner) breathed some really fresh ideas into a story that could laid there like a dead fish. In addition to some solid performances from Peter Sarsgaard & Vera Farmiga, the real standout is then ten-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman as the titular character. Much like Ellen Page in Hard Candy, she is a force to be reckoned with. Small packages don't always contain good things.

This was a huge leap forward for Rob Zombie in my opinion, as the MTV sensibilities of his previous works were abandoned for something more cinematic. The obvious love of films from days gone by is still here, but he seems much more restrained in Lords and lets pace and atmosphere take over. The cinematography and score also help to gloss over what is a fairly thin plot. I'm definitely interested to see on what side of the fence his next flick “31” falls on.

Likely my fave horror film of 2013, Oculus gave me everything I wanted. Mike Flanagan builds on the atmosphere and dread of his previous indie Absentia and weaves a very impressive tale. I feel this is one of the best examples of seamlessly juggling two different timelines within the same space. The cast is strong across the board and the scare pieces are really effective, at least to me anyway.

I just saw this a few weeks ago and was really impressed by it. Mark Duplass keeps showing his versatility having been involved in several genres, from comedy (TV's The League) to romantic drama (The One I Love) to horror (Baghead). Creep is an incredibly simple tale, with the camera pointed at Duplass for most of the film. The escalation as his antics become more uncomfortable for his interviewer is palpable and I liked that they kept finding new ways to invigorate its “found footage” narrative. That is by no means an easy feat in this day and age.

So, there you have it; four titles to keep you occupied should you feel the need to curl up with Big Red. But, for right now, GET OUTSIDE. It's beautiful out!!!

Kids Be Misbehavin'

After getting myself settled into my downtown Montreal abode, my Fantasia experience began with Jonathan Milott & Cary Murnion's horror comedy Cooties.

After an elementary school's student population become infected by a mysterious virus that turns them into feral cannibals, the teachers find themselves in a struggle for survival.

After its premiere at Sundance last year, Cooties seemed to disappear for a while, so I was glad to see it play here before it releases wide (and by wide, I mean the US and likely not Canada) in September.

Before I get to Cooties though, I'd like to mention the fantastic little short that played before it called Point of View. Made by fellow Torontoian Justin Harding – whom I was surprised none of my crew were even aware of, our film community is small, but obviously not as small as we thought – this short is basically everything you could want in a horror short film. While liberally borrowing from the premise of Doctor Who baddies The Weeping Angels (saying so in the credits makes it ok, right?), this piece had excellent pace, performances and makeup effects which made it a huge crowd pleaser.

Anyhoo, Cooties was a fun time. After an opening credit sequence that'll make you never want to eat chicken nuggets again, the film wastes very little time getting to the carnage. Though there are several good set pieces revolving around dispatching infected foes, I think the real strength is the ensemble assembled for this. They mesh together well and keep the movie from falling apart when the novelty of the byline wears off about an hour in. While the focus is on Elijah Wood & Rainn Wilson, who both do what they do very well, I thought that Leigh Whanell was the real scene stealer here. He had the majority of the best one-liners (perhaps because he co-wrote the screenplay) and his comedic timing was really on point.

Alison Pill & Elijah Wood in Cooties.

After recently re-watching The Faculty, it was funny to see this, as it is pretty much the reverse scenario, with the teachers being the besieged by the students. As the trailer would suggest, there is a lot of child murder in this movie. Granted, it is comedic and the antagonists are ferocious beasts, but they get mowed down in droves. It was interesting to see the reactions, which ranged from overly enthusiastic – seriously, after screenings of 2008's The Children and this, it seems like some people have a real blood lust for this stuff – to downright disturbed.

Patient Zero Shelley (Sunny May Allison) in Cooties.

Cooties is one of those movies where the trailer gives you an exact representation of what to expect. If you dig the trailer, you'll dig the movie.

Trailer Tuesdays: Devil Times Five.

Did I mention I fucking HATE WINTER? I've spent more time shovelling snow this past week than I did all last year. If winter had a face, I'd punch it. Then set it on fire. Then douse those flames with my urine.

But, I digress.

I chose today's trailer for more than just its wintery appearance, as February is Women In Horror Month. For the next four weeks, I'll be posting trailers for films made by the fairer sex. The above movie was co-written by Sandra Lee Blowitz.

For a more detailed (yet somewhat hazy) rundown of this picture, click here.

Trailer Tuesdays: Bloody Birthday

I finally watched this little gem from 1980 yesterday.

I was already a fan of Ed Hunt after watching The Brain and Plague (which coincidentally I reviewed exactly six years ago today) but this movie was so much fucking fun. I mean, let's run it down.

It has killer kids, including Billy Jacoby from Cujo & Superstition and Elizabeth Hoy who sports the best funeral dress ever! Twice!

It has a Pre-Porky's Peep Show.

It has junkyard action.

It has THIS fucking random party clown. 

Seriously, this is going in the Halloween costume idea file.

It has a cool score, which is this weird mash-up of Kolchak and Friday the 13th.

It has pre-action hero Michael Dudikoff.

American Ninja, crashing funerals like a boss!

It has a lot of pink and mauve. The transition from the seventies to the eighties was an awkward time.

The Blondie poster is the only thing in this shot that does not hurt my eyes.

Add these things all up and you have a real winner. I urge you to grab some friends and give this a whirl.