Tag: Jeffrey combs

William Malone’s House On Haunted Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I kinda get the beef with William Malone’s House On Haunted Hill, I mean it’s essentially a lazy, paper thin story gussied up by a whole bunch of spooky visual effects and fancy, baroque production design, but I loved it anyhow. Malone is the same guy who made the infamous FearDotCom and such was also the case there: nonsensical narrative made entirely watchable by pure visual artistry alone. Maybe the guy has a yet to be discovered career in music videos ahead of him. Anyways, the plot revolves around a weird looking building sat on a cliff overlooking the sea, a place which was once a freaky asylum run by a mad surgeon (Jeffry Combs with nary a word of dialogue) who murdered his patients. Half a century later it’s owned by snarky amusement park guru Geoffrey Rush and his potty mouthed femme fatale wife (Famke Jannssen). They invite several bored LA types over for the night including a faded baseball star (Taye Diggs), a movie studio VP (Ali Larter), a smarmy hotshot Doctor (Peter Gallagher) and a tabloid journalist (Bridgette Wilson Sampras). The deal is, if you make it one night alive in this place Rush will pay you a cool million bucks. You can guess what happens next. This film is very short on story and a lot of it is just characters wandering through grimly lit corridors and getting haunted by unseen terrors. The characters are hilarious though and the cast is really having fun. Rush is a gnarled hoot as the misanthropic tycoon, with a pencil moustache as precariously thin as his threshold for having tantrums. The lovely Janssen is saddled with a trashy role that’s beneath her classy talents but she’s game and makes this chick one seriously bratty, scene stealing bitch. Chris Kattan also shows up as like… the butler or caretaker of this place I guess? I had an acting teacher once tell us that every performance you give should be modelled after the physicality and essence of one member of the animal kingdom. Chris heard that and apparently decided to base every role for the rest of his career on a squirrel with a serious meth habit, because that’s what I felt like I was watching when he was onscreen. I can understand why this film doesn’t get a lot of love, it’s a remake of a no doubt cherished 60’s horror film and that coupled with its lack of a real story… I get it. However, I really enjoyed it for the set design and very freaky visual horror creations. I think that director Malone missed his calling as a full blown, thoroughbred surrealist like Lynch or Merhige because he has a real gift with abstract, otherworldly makeup, editing and FX. Some of the berserk visual stuff later is right out of a post modern video collage installation and reminded me of like Jacob’s Ladder or Eraserhead. If Malone put that talent to work in a project that would allow him to fully be taken seriously as a filmmaker he’d be the stuff of Lynchian legends. But hey, this film is super fun too, if kinda slight. Rush and his merry band of fellow cast-mates are great, and like I said it gets genuinely fucking weird right near the end, and weird is always good. Oh also, bonus points for using Marilyn Manson’s Sweet Dreams as a kind of theme song. Oh and also: this is like one in an unofficial trilogy with 13 Ghosts and Ghost Ship as early 2000’s ensemble piece gonzo horror with metal infused soundtracks, produced by the Dark Castle label, excessively opulent special effects and bad reputations, and I love all three to bits no matter what anyone says.

-Nate Hill

Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

If Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond is beyond anything it’s the borders of good taste, for the most part anyways. This is a slimy, gooey, sleazy, schlocky piece of ooze that functions on an inherently terrific central premise, but drags it through the muck of lowbrow, lurid horror, and without apology. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just not what I was expecting I guess, or not to that level. Gordon totem Jeffrey Combs plays a twitchy lab assistant whose piece of work boss (Ted Sorel) has patented a weird machine called the ‘resonator’ which uses psychic vibrations to enlarge the human pineal gland and open the doors of perception to whatever horrific beings lurk out there in other dimensions, which in this case is not as many as I’d hoped. A seemingly idealistic yet surprisingly corruptible psychologist (Barbara Crampton) and a cavalier police detective (the great Ken Foree) escort traumatized Combs back into the house where these experiments previously went berserk and wouldn’t you know it, someone pulls a whoopsie, turns the resonator thingie back on and it all goes berserk again! Thing is, I was expecting an impressive variety of ghoulies, icky aberrations and Lovecraftian hoo-hah to emerge and terrorize them, and the only thing that really does is a severely malformed new version of Combs’s boss, as you can see on the charming poster in my photo grid. He’s an admirably gross special effect, but where’s the variety, man? Where’s the whole zoo of disgusting unholy fuckers to rival something like… Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness? Maybe this thing had budget constraints, lack of creative juices or what-have-ya, but I just felt like there could have been… more, given such a delicious setup. Also, there’s some trashy bits that were unnecessary, a weird, awkward S&M freak show vibe that didn’t need to be shoehorned in and take it from someone who appreciates the uber-kinky aura in something like Hellraiser (where it was appropriate) when I tell you… it was not necessary here, it cheapens and dilutes the potential for true otherworldly horror. By the film’s climax we get several folks running amok with their sentient pineal glands protruding from their foreheads like glistening head-penises and it lands squarely in WTF-ville. Anyways there’s scenes that are ok, with the neat 80’s effects, score and aesthetic, but something just feels… ‘off’ about this one. Like the freaky deaky aspects that are so much fun in other similar films just.. landed with a clunk here. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but a film with such a cool concept just should have done more, and avoided being so trashy in certain key areas.

-Nate Hill

William Malone’s FearDotCom

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’ve written about this film before a few years ago and absolutely trashed it, but after a revisit is realize that I was either too harsh or my tastes shifted, because FearDotCom, although a narrative catastrophe, is a stylistic and artistic wellspring of morbidly beautiful visual excess. It almost doesn’t even belong in a movie theatre or home screen but in some avant garde museum as an experimental piece of video. The plot, as far as I could swing it: Two detectives (Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone) in one of those constantly rainy, impossibly bleak inner cities investigate a string of murders tied to a strange website and carried out by a sadistic, monotone lunatic (Stephen Rea). Both the website and the murders are apparently linked to the ghost of a creepy little hemophiliac girl with a bouncy ball, but how or why remains a mystery because the film doesn’t feel the need to coherently explain any of its plot points. The cops, the killer, other various oddballs, the website, none of it is strung together with any kind of proper storytelling adhesive or logic and there’s simply no piecing it together in a way that makes sense. That leaves you to give up and let the film wash over you as a sort of sensory experience, an expressionist’s dream of eerie sound, striking viscera, abstract visuals and potent atmosphere. The film works on that level, if you can compromise story for ambience. This is one of those cities like in The Crow, Dark City or Seven where it’s always raining, always nighttime, all the light fixtures swing and strobe uneasily, every subway station is abandoned, smokestacks and power plant silos stand sentiment across the horizon and the residential buildings look like they’re limping along after a severe earthquake. It was filmed in Luxembourg and Montreal but is obstinately set in NYC which leads to hilarious contradictions in architectural landmarks. The ghostly images and horror elements look like they’re inspired by everything from Murnau to Merhige and are at times truly inspired. The cast, although hailing from various genre paths, all somehow seem suited to something this weird. Dorff comes from horror roots and has perfected this angry, brooding aura to a science, McElhone seems to handpick the strangest projects and is always an ethereal presence in whatever she shows up in, Irish character player Rea mostly stars in Neil Jordan stuff and is no stranger to the bizarre while genre legend Udo Kier shows up in the most random, wordless cameo of his career. The visual aspect is almost indescribable until you’re neck deep in it, picture the stark stylistic choices from The Matrix with some serious Silent Hill vibes and a very ‘Euro’ flavour to the whole thing. It’s interesting that an American studio horror flick about stuff like cops hunting a serial killer and some murder website ended up looking, feeling and sounding like something from a literal other dimension, and that kind of outcome can’t be written off as simply a bad film in every way but viewed as a messy yet provocative experimental curio. It’s just a shame the story got fatally shredded somewhere between conception and execution, or this could have been something really great. Oh and fun fact: the producers couldn’t secure the web domain name ‘fear.com’ because whoever owned it wouldn’t sell *for any price*, so in the film when we see the actual site it’s ‘feardotcom.com’ which is so hilarious to me and just adds to the overall weirdness even more.

-Nate Hill

Not your average Poe: An Audience with Jeffrey Combs by Kent Hill

by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over Men at Work and why can’t they make a sequel. While I feasted on potato chips nearly napping, suddenly there came a rapping, turns out it was Herbert West a-rapping, at my chamber door.

I just want to go on the record and say there are a handful acting dynamos out there that have enjoyed long and industrious careers. But then, there’s Jeffrey Combs. If you’ll forgive the crassness of a STEP BROTHERS fan (and Jeff, I mean this as a compliment mate), Mr Combs is the f#@king Catalina Wine Mixer of genre/character/genius actors.  You need only to watch Sir Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners – nothing further your Honor.

Now I love RE-ANIMATOR, I love the RE-ANIMATOR fans, heck I have card-carrying diehards as friends, but I must confess I’m more of a fan of Jeff’s Cellar Dwelling, Fortressy, Robot Joxy, Doctor Mordridy type offerings – and don’t get me started on Honky Tonk Freeway – whole other show.

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But for right now let’s focus on NEVERMORE. The creators of the eleventh episode in the second season of Masters of Horror have brought their act to a literal theatre near you – but if you’re reading this outside of the US – sorry. Directing legend, Stuart Gordon (Space Truckers) and his (frequent) co-writer from “The Black Cat” Dennis Paoli (From Beyond) have created a vehicle which has brought to the stage a critically heralded experience that has delighted audiences for over a decade.

Hailed as “a landmark performance” by the L.A. Times, Combs has thrilled crowds across the country with his dynamic and revelatory portrayal of the legendary Poe.

This marks NEVERMORE’s Westchester County, NY, premiere, an event made extra special by the area’s bicentennial celebration of Washington Irving—a contemporary of Poe who was, from Poe’s perspective, also a rival. As Combs recalled in a recent River Journal article, “I don’t think they ever met. I take dark delight in pointing out that Poe doesn’t have very nice things to say about Irving. Specifically, about Irving’s penchant for always having a moral to his stories while Poe was often criticized for being without morals.”

SHIFF (The Sleepy Hollow Film Festival) celebrates the Hudson Valley’s wellspring of American history, of classic literature, and the continuing legacy of supernatural writings and cinematic works that it has inspired,” says festival co-founder Taylor White. “We’re excited to have NEVERMORE as part of the festival because it encapsulates so many of these ideas—not to mention it’s a fantastic show, at the perfect time of year, in the perfect venue. We can’t wait for the crowd to experience it!”

As Combs added in the River Journal, “Poe was truly one of America’s great writers. I’m honoured every time I step on stage and recite his beautiful words.”

SHIFF, a celebration of outstanding genre cinema in the cradle of the American supernatural, takes place in Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, NY, October 10-13, 2019.

Finally, Jeff Combs was an absolute pleasure to chat with, his personality is as vivacious and extraordinary as the multitude of characters he has brought to our screens. If we had more time I would have really delved a great deal deeper – but, never being one to turn down opportunity when he comes a-rapping at my chamber door, I could not in good conscience turn down the chance to talk with one of the world’s most original performers. He’s still batting a thousand, I hope you’ll enjoy…

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Stuart Gordon’s ReAnimator

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Stuart Gordon’s ReAnimator is a healthy dose of schlocktastic fun, taking a page out of the silly splatter book of Sam Raimi, and although not quite as fun as some of the stuff it draws inspiration from, it does the trick. I know this film has a massive cult fanbase and while I can’t say that I loved it quite as much as some no doubt do, I always have some love for gory practical effects, and the ones on display here are pretty impressive. Jeffrey Combs is funny (if not exactly the definition of subtle throughout his whole career) as Dr. Herbert West, a loony fuckin quack who has stumbled upon an ectoplasmic looking serum that brings dead corpses back to life, albeit with a side of extreme retardation. Things go riotously awry when a jealous rival (David Gale) literally loses his head and steals it, prompting a gruesome comedy of errors in which heads, limbs, blood and entrails are hurled about the screen in a feverish celebration of all things gory and grisly. You can’t exactly call them zombies, I mean I suppose they are but they’re given a modicum more sentience than your average shambling Romero flesh-eater, but the actors get to have fun with their zany side, as the formula sort of plays havoc with their cognitive functions, a hilarious touch. There’s a sexually icky part that was even a bit in bad taste for my lax sensibilities (poor Barbara Crampton is a trooper and better have gotten paid hefty fucking overtime), but I suppose that trash is sort of the name of the game here. The 80’s was a very formative decade for the horror genre, and its fascinating to see how not only was this inspired by earlier stuff like Raimi, but would itself go on to rouse other filmmakers and give them ideas, as Hollywood progresses in symbiosis. A fun, freaky time.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory- Brian Yuzna’s Faust: Love Of The Damned 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


I think Goethe might do a few barrel roles in his grave if he ever saw Brian Yuzna’s Faust: Love Of The Damned, an unhinged, risible and obnoxious rendition of his literary works, filled with Spawn inspired effects, heavy metal music, extreme nudity and a general sense of debauched commotion running through it. When regular guy John Jaspers (Mark Frost) sells his soul to the mysterious M (Andrew Divoff) in order to exact revenge on those who killed his girlfriend, things don’t… quite go as planned. Before he knows it he’s transformed into some ridiculous walking demon vigilante thing, given snazzy superpowers and set loose on the city. M, being the devil, is naturally not a man of his word and is planning some horrific apocalyptic mayhem using Faust’s unwitting help, and it all goes so monumentally haywire it’s hard to tell what is even going on, for fuck’s sake. Much of the film consists of him just running about with blaring music in the background, killing people in over the top, spectacularly gory ways. Story has little place here amongst the ruckus din of VFX and soft core porn sensibilities. Divoff is in Djinn mode as M, sporting a startling blonde dye job and Mayan inspired costume design, and having as much fun as every Hollywood character actor has playing Old Scratch himself. There’s a scene where he reprimands his hot sidekick by causing her to melt into a moaning pile of her own bodily fluids that will have everyone nervously shifting on the couch and wondering just exactly what the fuck they’re watching. The Reanimator himself Jeffrey Combs has an eccentric police detective role that somehow just gets swallowed up by the orgy of visual and auditory assault that the film consists of. Nothing remotely similar to the original tale of Faust, you’ll either get a sick thrill, laugh the whole way through or get up and walk out. I loved it. 

-Nate Hill