Tag: Sid Haig

THE JACK HILL FILES: PIT STOP (1969)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

After toiling on more Roger Corman-produced stitch jobs in which he directed additional footage that was subsequently pasted onto existing projects, writer/director Jack Hill set his sights on the exploitation-friendly world of stock car racing with the 1967-shot, 1969-released Pit Stop (originally titled The Winner). Dressed in juvenile delinquent clothing and featuring the delivered-on promise of insane figure-8 track racing, the film explores much deeper themes of competition, sportsmanship, greed, and disillusionment and contains what is probably Sid Haig’s greatest and most nuanced performance of his life. And in a brief career of highly entertaining and smart genre films, Pit Stop gives the rest of Jack Hill’s oeuvre a run for its money.

Any simpler and the plot of Pit Stop would unfold itself. Hot shot Palmdale drag racer Rick Bowman (Richard Davalos) falls in with local L.A. car-enthusiast stakehorse Grant Willard (Brian Donlevy) who introduces him to the world of figure-8 racing where he tangles with charismatic Hawk Sidney (Sid Haig) and others as he climbs the professional ladder.

From that description, you couldn’t drag me to the theater to see Pit Stop even if you were paying and throwing in five pre-rolls in the bargain. When one’s favorite film regarding car culture is David Cronenberg’s Crash, you know that there is little interest to be had in checkered flags or intake manifolds. But the standard story of the novice who works his way up through the ranks is bejeweled by the attention to detail, the smart casting choices, the strongly drawn characters, and the punchy, no-nonsense dialogue all of which breathe such a life into the film and makes it all impossible to resist. I mean, “Is there any place left in this world where there aren’t any old beer cans?” is a line that is so poetic that it makes you forget you’re watching that was something that was supposed to play on a double bill in a drive-in.

In terms of the looks of the picture, Hill balances crisp and clean dramatic compositions with a great deal of documentary-style, on-the-ground footage of the figure-8 racing which is such a disorienting spectacle of twisted metal and dust that it becomes clear that keeping your bearings while racing on one of these tracks is of the most utmost importance. With the aid of cinematographer Austin McKinney, Hill is also able to pull off a lot of great filler moments like the montage of Rick working among the wrecks in the junkyard. What could be standard is elevated to high art in creative shots showing Rick scouring the yard for pieces while bouncing off hardtops and hoods as if he’s skipping over a bunch of crowded stones in a riverbed or when he climbs a mountain of junk silhouetted against a setting California sun. But magic is most especially generated in a sequence that documents an off-track gathering of dune buggies and ATV’s as they crawl through the high desert, defying gravity as they emerge from the natural, yawning divots in the sand-packed landscape all of which is set to a pulsating, rocking good score by The Daily Flash and John Fridge.

The performances by Brian Donlevy and Richard Davolos are both very good, but special mention has to be given to Sid Haig and Ellen Burstyn (here credited as Ellen McRae). Going from arrogant cock-of-the-walk to sympathetic minor-hero, Haig brings equal amount of swagger, energy, and heavy-lidded pathos to a role that could have been forgettable in a lesser actor’s hands. As Ellen McLeod, the wife, business partner, and assistant mechanic of racer Ed McLeod, Burstyn’s balance of frustrated spouse and professional functionary is done with deft, sympathetic execution that adds multiple dimensions to an otherwise rote and throwaway role. And Beverly Washburn, back from Jack Hill’s remarkable Spider Baby, is both soulful and bubbly as a button-cute, pixie-cut hanger-on.

As stated before, Pit Stop would hardly be memorable if it was all about the text. What makes it soar is the brooding and sobering subtext some of which is found early on in the junk man’s speech to Rick about how the racer makes the short money and generally ends up in a wrecked body while the lion’s share of the dough goes into the pocket of the promoter/manager. This is the kind of wisdom that can be extrapolated to virtually any vocation in which one’s body is used as a kind of currency for the wealthier folks pulling the strings above. And in fact Brian Donlevy’s Grant Willard is a true snake and one who makes no bones about it. He’s a man who has a piece of so much action on the race track that he can pit driver against driver in the hopes that one of his cars wins and that the crashes in the intersection on his track are gruesome enough to generate crowds. Racers like Rick and Hawk are just chattel.

It’s only at the end do we see that Rick understood that brutal truth all along and just didn’t care. For in Pit Stop, winning is an ugly thing that is awarded only when one gives up their soul and spirit just for the simple pleasure of being first. For every ten audience members that would gasp when this inevitability plays out in the film’s final two minutes, there is probably one who fully understands why the movie plays it this way and nods in agreement as Rick and Grant drive off from the wreckage they’ve left behind.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

THE JACK HILL FILES: SPIDER BABY (1967)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

While the reputation for Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre damn near drowns in its tangential relation to real-life serial killer Ed Gein, there is rarely a peep of recognition for Spider Baby, Jack Hill’s incredible film from 1967 which feels like more of a direct influence on the film than the legend of the backwoods monster from Wisconsin. Where only trace elements of Gein’s crimes were appropriated for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the juxtaposition of families both civilized and uncivilized duking it out in an isolated, dilapidated split-level where people quite literally eat other people is complete Spider Baby turf.

Stepping off on the right foot with a framing device in which Quinn Redeker’s Dudley-Do-Right square, Peter, breaks the fourth wall that feels like Criswell by way of Douglas Neidermeyer, Spider Baby spins a yarn regarding the creepy Merrey family, a rag-tag clan of inbreds who dwell in a large, dingy house behind a giant, iron gate that has long been overrun with dead vegetation. Suffering from a condition that takes its namesake from the family, each member is in a constant state of mental regression as they advance in age, eventually causing them to devolve into a pre-human state that leads to cannibalism. When a group of greedy relations descend upon the house to stake their claim to their inheritance, absolutely delightful chaos ensues.

I’m not quite sure if there was ever a horror film remotely like Jack Hill’s Spider Baby before it was made in 1964 (due to the producer’s bankruptcy, it didn’t see the light of day until 1967). It’s sick, perverse, truly creepy, and something of a cut above the drive-in and B-picture fare of its day. Aided by a truly sinister script by Hill and glorious black and white cinematography courtesy of genius-level pro Alfred Taylor, Spider Baby threads a careful needle between art and sleaze while never looking less than a million bucks. Also remarkable about Spider Baby is just how perfectly it balances horror and comedy. A lot of films work overtime to be horror comedies but they usually end up being unfunny and belabored half-assed neither-nors. In fact, so littered is the graveyard with subpar examples to the contrary, I can probably count the number of truly successful horror comedies on both hands with Spider Baby occupying the first thumb or digit (depending on your style of counting with your hand).

One of the things that further distinguishes Spider Baby is its sympathetic and humanistic central performance courtesy of Lon Chaney, Jr. As family chauffeur and protector, Bruno, Chaney brings the highest level of professionalism and emotional complexity to a role that most actors wouldn’t think necessary. A key moment near the end of the film becomes unexpectedly moving as Hill’s camera trains on Chaney’s face, observing Chaney as he heartbreakingly realizes what he must do to truly save the family from themselves, proving that Chaney was one of the most under appreciated of the Universal Monster players. There is also a sweet natured approach to the wild characters in the family and their ghastly actions as they are treated like Charles Addams figures come to life, albeit with a bit more teeth. But by casting the civilized people as the true monsters of the piece, Hill hits on a gold mine of subtext that continues to pay dividends today.

Aside from Chaney, Hill gets a lot from his troupe of actors, some of whom were part of his regular gang that popped up in various Roger Corman productions such as Hill’s Blood Bath and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 (which has enough footage directed by Hill to ALMOST count as a co-effort). Beverly Washburn, Jill Banner, and Sid Haig all have an utter gas as the doomed progeny and the aforementioned Redeker pitches his role as the sweet-natured dunderheaded hero perfectly. Also, big ups go to Carol Ohmart in what could have been a thankless turn as the stereotypical cold-hearted and impossibly greedy bitch. Ohmart ratchets everything up to eleven with her tongue in her cheek, finally spinning off into delirious greatness in the film’s final moments as her materialistic deceitfulness gives way to an amorously debauched and animalistic passion for a slobbering man-child Sid Haig. I mean… it’s really something to behold.

While it contains definite nods to Psycho (the bird taxidermy, the Edward Hopper-like house in the middle of nowhere, the preservation of the ghoulish remains of family members) Spider Baby takes a giant step forward in terms of tone, content, and style and ultimately stakes a serious claim as one of the most significant horror films of the sixties. There’s just nothing else quite like it.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

THE JACK HILL FILES: BLOOD BATH (1966)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

If I were a filmmaker, I would kill for the ad campaign American International afforded to Blood Bath. One could stare for hours at its gorgeously macabre one-sheet which overflows with all kinds of promise for the brave audience member who would dare pay a ticket to witness the horrors ahead. Maidens being lowered into a pit of boiling blood while others are chained to a wall amid a mass of skeletons and cobwebs all behind a wrought-iron portcullis? Who’s not up for that ride?

Naturally, it being an American International production, only some of the ad campaign for Blood Bath was going to be true. There’s certainly a pit into which maidens caught up in suspended net traps could be lowered but, unfortunately, they’d literally get a wax bath as there is no blood in sight. Nor, now that you mention it, are there any other maidens shackled to the walls. And you can totally forget the skeletons. Not sure what’s going with them in that one-sheet.

In fact, fuck the skeletons. One could hardly be faulted for not being sure what’s going on with anything in Blood Bath at all. For instead of it being the next feature in Jack Hill’s career after his remarkable debut, Mondo Keyhole, Blood Bath was a salvage job given to Hill and Stephanie Rothman, another budding young talent in Corman’s universe. A true Frankenstein’s monster of a film, Blood Bath, stands out less as a crucial piece of either Hill or Rothman’s resumes and more as its own summer college course on Roger Corman and how he could take a convoluted, middling art-heist thriller named Operation: Titian and turn it into three other movies, two of them vampire films.

I shall not spend the day going through the howzits and whyzits of the Roger Corman School of Preserve and Recycle that would chronicle the history of Operation: Titian and how it wound its way into first becoming Portrait of Terror, then Blood Bath, and, finally, Track of the Vampire. That story will never be better laid out than in author Tim Lucas’s fascinating and painstakingly detailed, feature-length video essay, The Problem With Titian, included in Arrow’s deluxe Blu ray release of Blood Bath. Just understand that Roger Corman was a man who was going to realize the maximize value of an investment, no matter what he had to do to realize that value and without the slightest regards to how ugly the vehicle that delivered the value looked. For, if he did, we would not be talking about Blood Bath at all and, instead, how Operation: Titian is a fine thriller that’s overly complicated and disjointed but not without some nice lighting and gorgeous Dubrovnik locales. The end.

But we’re here to talk about Blood Bath, the third attempt to make something out of Operation: Titian and, up until then, the most radical of the repurposing of the original footage. For out of Blood Bath’s paltry running time of 62 minutes, no more than 8% of it originates from Operation: Titian. Instead, it keeps a few moments of exterior architecture shots and reuses a few shots of Titian’s prowling, cape-adorned figure for its own needs, but all sprinkled throughout a fairly new narrative curiously of extensive reshoots by Hill and, later, Rothman.

Blood Bath chiefly rethinks William Campbell’s madman from Operation: Titian and Portrait of Terror. Where he was but an imposter to the Sordi name in those two films, he is part of the actual Sordi lineage in Blood Bath. In Titian and Portrait, Sordi was the patriarch to a cursed clan and commissioned the artist Titian to paint a portrait of his doomed wife. In Blood Bath, Sordi is transformed into an artist of historical note; just as popular as Titian but whose name was destroyed with his work when he was burned at the stake as a heretic. And according to Lucas’s video essay, Hill’s original film had Campbell succumbing to an obsessive madness which caused him to kill the models that would pose for him. Obsessed and possessed by the spirit of Melitza, Sordi’s black magic-riddled lover from the past, Campbell’s mania would eventually spin out of control by the end of the film as the spirits of his victims would emerge from their wax cocoons and overtake him in a moment that would predate Hill’s Spider-Baby by a couple of years and William Lustig’s Maniac by many more.

Some of this footage still exists in Blood Bath. But what also exists is a bizarre, left-field graft in which the Sordi lineage was ALSO cursed with vampirism, thus allowing William Campbell’s mad-artist to also dissolve into a prowling, cape-adorned (see above) vampire (who, it should also be noted, looks nothing like William Campbell). New characters are added to the mix as the vampire story, wholly a concoction of Rothman’s, created a new branch in the narrative that needed some exposition. And it goes without saying that Stephanie Rothman’s contributions to the film, no matter how well-intentioned or commercially necessary, sink the film. And this is even more the case with Track of the Vampire, the longer television cut of Blood Bath. Adding even more incongruous pickup scenes to the already wobbly story and placing Patrick Magee’s character, who appears rather puzzlingly only in corpse form in Blood Bath, back into the mix (through the magic of poor ADR and editing, he is transformed from the lethal art thief in Titian to a cuckolded husband in Track), Track of the Vampire is the sad, final end to the long journey of Operation: Titian.

Audiences looking for anything resembling a traditional Jack Hill film will likely find little to mine in Blood Bath. As mentioned before, the film’s ending has a surprisingly creepy vibe that is in line with Spider-Baby and the appearances by Sid Haig and Karl Schanzer all give it a lighter touch and familiar feel than what was served up in Operation: Titian or Portrait of Terror. Additionally, Hill’s dreamy, impressionistic desert flashbacks give the film the same kind of artistic edge found in the grime of Mondo Keyhole. But, unlike that film, there is a lack of interesting or strong female characters here. There is a hint of sexual progressiveness in Lori Saunders’s ballet dancer, Dorean, who wants to sleep with Campbell’s Sordi in the worst way, but he is impotent, a factor in his mania. This harkens back to the characters in Mondo Keyhole but without any kind of satisfying payoff in terms of the Dorean character. In Mondo Keyhole, the female protagonist broke free of her untenable and unhealthy relationship with an abuser and simultaneously found herself in a wild, celebratory orgy of free love. Here, Dorean gets rescued by Karl Schanzer’s character as if she were just a cliched damsel in distress.

In the end, Blood Bath was an assignment for the two fledgling filmmakers more than it was a movie. Both Hill and Rothman would go on to craft bigger and better things; Rothman moving on to make The Student Nurses, one of the better “Nurse Movies” for Roger Corman, and The Velvet Vampire, a fun AIP attempt at making a Jess Franco film. Hill would reassemble some of the cast for Blood Bath and move almost immediately to Spider-Baby which would become the granddaddy of all “backwoods family” horror films and further cement his legacy as a master of genre cinema with a little more on his mind than most.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

Rob Zombie’s 3 From Hell

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s been roughly fifteen years since Rob Zombie blasted onto the horror scene with his brilliant exploitation block party The Devil’s Rejects, and has now followed it up with 3 From Hell, a long awaited continuation following the further adventures of the murderous, hilarious, never boring Firefly clan. So, does it live up to Rejects? Well… no, but what could? Is it a good film? Hell fucking yes it is and although it’s arguable whether or not a third outing with these characters was necessary, in my eyes it was always more than welcome. Zombie is an inexplicably hated filmmaker and his detractors always make me laugh in their abject refusal to concede that he knows what he’s doing within the genre. It’s fine if it ain’t your thing, it’s all cool if his style doesn’t jive with yours, but whether or not he’s a talented, imaginative horror filmmaker just isn’t up for debate in my opinion.

So the Firefly family survived their Peckinpah standoff with the cops, which if you’ve seen Devil’s Rejects you’ll agree is a move both audacious and sheepish on Zombie’s part. Incarcerated indefinitely and placed squarely on death row, Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) make no end of trouble for the buffoonish warden (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and his harried staff. Otis stages a violent prison break (reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, I might add) with the involuntary help of Danny Trejo’s Rondo, a character who met an even more finality laden death in Rejects but nonetheless hilariously appears here without even a scar. Once he and Baby are free from their bonds they hook up with their equally murderous and profane half brother Winslow Wolfman Foxworth Coltrane (Richard Brake, Zombie’s newest muse) and take a road trip down to Mexico. There they wade themselves into as much hedonistic debauchery as they can until, once again, trouble comes looking for them.

So the main thing here is how does this hold up when placed alongside the other two in the trilogy and I’ll be the first to admit it’s the weakest of the three. It’s the least grimy, shocking, hallucinatory and overall spiked with madness too. But it’s also the most laidback and straightforward outing, which I can appreciate. It feels like a hangout film with instances of horror, a wistful afterthought to wash down the glory days and carnage of its predecessors. If there’s one thing that *is* crazier than the other two though its Baby; she has a caged animal, untethered ferocity here that even alarms Otis, who remarks that she’s way more nuts than he remembers her, which is quite the statement coming from him. Anywho they are surrounded by Zombie’s beloved, customary and always welcome bunch of forgotten character actors from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s including Richard Edson, Dee Wallace, Clint Howard, Daniel Roebuck, Lucinda Jenny, Sean Whalen, Richard Rhiele, Barry Bostwick, Duane Whitaker and Austin Stoker who we lovingly remember as the Sheriff in John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13. As most of you know the great Sid Haig passed away very recently and had been ill for a while before that, so his appearance here is sadly limited to a single scene, but it’s a loving send off from Zombie and a terrific if brief swan song for Sid and Spaulding alike. Was this film absolutely necessary? Of course not, Rejects had the perfect poetic justice ending and this story would have been fine if the buck continued to stop there. Am I grateful for a continuation and appreciative of it? You bet I am. Zombie shows talent again in writing simultaneously funny and scary scenes, crafting beautifully grungy production design and drawing you into this world. I almost saw this as a hazy fever dream had by the Fireflies as they are getting shot to bits at the end of Rejects, like a Jacob’s Ladder type foresight into a future that never happened in the final moments of thought before death. It’s a nice final outing with these lovable, hateful psychopaths and a good time overall.

-Nate Hill

Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown runs right around two and a half hours, and if you were to go through the film and separate all the scenes that are directly about the central plot specifics from the ones that are simply characters hanging out, shooting the shit and socializing, you’d probably cut the film in half. There’s a lesson I was taught in film school and it goes something like “every scene in the script must serve/move the plot and anything that doesn’t must go.” Well, I get the creative sentiment there but it’s often much more complicated than that, and often very subjective what one person will distill personally from a scene and use for their appreciation of the story overall versus another person being bored by it. In the case of Jackie Brown, I absolutely loved each and every laidback scene of breezy character development. These people start talking about movies, weed, cars, guns, the city or anything offhand and slowly, gradually they shift into what the story is about, which is the genius of Tarantino’s screenplay, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch.

As the titular Jackie Brown, Pam Grier gives the performance of her career as a desperate middle aged career woman trying to score a little extra loot for herself, and getting trapped between a rock and a hard place in the process. She smuggles cash in from Mexico for low rent arms dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), a fast talking psychopath who enlists his newly released ex con pal Louis (Robert De Niro) into helping him out with the latest gig. Also involved is Ordell’s beach bunny stoner girlfriend Melanie (Bridget Fonda), a low level thug on his payroll (Chris Tucker) and stoic, sad eyed bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster). All these players shuffle around the LA chessboard, often lazily and in no rush and it’s these scenes that give the film its lifeblood. Jackie and Max find compassion, solace and bittersweet romance together, Tarantino let’s them circle each other in no great hurry and later in the film when they do share a kiss it’s just the most beautiful, well built up moment. Grier comes from a blaxploitation background and it’s apparent in her performance, but we also get the sense that this operates on a real plane, much more so than many other Tarantino films. Forster is always noble, observant and calm in most of his career, there’s a few obscure manic performances from him out there but for the most part he underplays his work. Max has to be his best creation, a steely journeyman dude who’s seen enough and wants something new in his life, something he finds in Jackie as he falls in love with her literally at first sight.

This is a character piece, and in addition to Grier and Forster we get incredibly vivid, funny and idiosyncratic work from all involved. Jackson is hysterical as the most verbose cat of the bunch, he’s also scarier than Jules in Pulp Fiction too. DeNiro plays Louis as a dim-headed fuck-up who seems to be playing dumb to stealth people, then seems to actually be thick again until we’re just not sure right up until the hilarious last few beats of his arc that result in some of the funniest black comedy I’ve ever seen. Fonda let’s a stoned veneer hide a deep resentment and hatred for pretty much everyone around her until she takes it one step too far and pays for it hilariously. Michael Keaton and Michael Bowen show up doing a flawless good cop bad cop routine as a local Detective and an ATF agent on both Jackie’s and Ordell’s trail. Watch for Lisa Gay Hamilton, Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister and genre veteran Sid Haig as well.

I get conflicted when ranking this amongst other Tarantino films because he’s adapting someone else’s work and therefore it’s not purely his creation, which is always when his most energetic and inspired stuff happens. Jackie Brown is a masterpiece and one of my favourite films, no doubt. But it’s Tarantino doing something else, chilling out in the pool and letting this cast of characters hang out too, in bars, beach apartments, cars, cluttered offices, malls and airports. There’s no great momentum or surge behind this story, it’s all very laconic and easy breezy, which is the strongest quality. But it just as much feels like a Leonard story as it does Tarantino, which works too. His crazy, wild style and pop culture obsessions are given a modest track to race around because of Leonard’s low key, slow burn dialogue aesthetic and the resulting flavour is so good it’s almost perfect. But it’s not just Quentin at the helm. Whatever your thoughts on that and comparisons with this film next to the ones he’s both written and directed, there’s no arguing that this is a beautiful, hilarious, touching, suspenseful, romantic classic of the crime genre.

-Nate Hill

Rob Zombie’s The Lords Of Salem

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Rob Zombie’s output has been hallmarked by a series of grungy, profane exploitation throwbacks with in your face violence and a loud, mean grind-house aesthetic. As much as I love *that* sensibility (I’m a hardcore fan of his films), what makes The Lords Of Salem so special is that he tries something different than he’s used to, ditches the comfort blanket of Manson-esque killers and brash, lewd dialogue in favour of mood, atmosphere and the kind of pacing you’d find in early 70’s fright flicks that valued aura over gore. This shows that although pretty much married to his trademark style (the third Firefly Family film is in production as we speak), he knows how to branch out successfully and has made a fantastic piece of slow burn horror with Salem. Set both during the infamous witch trials and in the present day, it focuses on quiet, introverted radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie). Now, if you’ve seen Sheri in the Firefly films you’ll know that the words ‘quiet’ and ‘introverted’ are a far cry from what she’s used to, but she’s brilliant here as a damaged recovering addict haunted by devilish forces. Plagued by sinister neighbours (Patricia Quinn, Dee Wallace and a freaky Judy Geeson), hallucinatory visions of evil and a mysterious music album mailed right to her radio station, it soon becomes clear that the demons of the past have come back to haunt Salem and have chosen her as a dark avatar. Zombie lovingly casts his films with carefully chosen icons of 60’s and 70’s genre cinema, and as such we get the likes of Ken Foree, Richard Lynch, Richard Fancy, Udo Kier, Maria Conchita Alonso, Michael Berryman, Sid Haig and more. Stealing the show is electric blue eyed Meg Foster in a blood freezing turn as Margaret Morgan, leader of the original Salem coven generations before. Foster hails from stuff like John Carpenter’s They Live, The live action Masters Of The Universe and recently Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return, but she’s absolutely terrifying and almost unrecognizable here as a freaky old hell hag with a raspy voice and gruesome saggy tits, truly a memorable villain. This is a film that takes its time building up to outright horror, alternating between dimly lit, spooky scenes from the original trials and the mounting tension of present day, including a subplot where an investigative scholar (Bruce Davison) tries to unearth evil and warn Heidi before it’s too late. Jarringly surreal visuals abound here, from neon palettes to a grandiose nightmare sequence involving a demon baby and some seriously strange architecture. It all builds to a searing finale that some may find to over the top or garish, but fits the story and ends the tale on a feverish note of hellish commotion, colour saturation and horrific spectacle that plays like Ken Russell by way of Dario Argento with a dash of David Lynch at his craziest. This is my favourite film in Zombie’s career so far, for its mood, unique visual language and rhythmic pacing, but also for his willingness to blast through the cobwebs of uncharted stylistic territory and bring forth well wrought, fresh artistic style and a damn great horror film too.

-Nate Hill

Rob Zombie’s House Of 1000 Corpses

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Rob Zombie’s House Of 1000 Corpses is a lot to sit through, and at times is a victim of its own overly zany ambition. Nevertheless, it’s the first stepping stone in the path of one of the most fascinating and talented directorial careers in the industry, and is a completely batshit mental curiosity in its own right. Zombie sprung onto the scene with this one and has since been a controversial, much talked about and frequently hated voice of horror. Let’s get one thing transparently clear: No one can be blamed for not enjoying his films, they’re incredibly niche and not everyone’s thing, but you are simply lying to yourself if you won’t concede what a hugely talented writer, director and all round filmmaker he is. I’ve had to get quite stern in conversations with people whose tunnel vision stubbornness supersedes their ability to logically analyze his work, and I simply won’t put up with it. Alright, scolding done, over to the film. I’ll be the first to admit that House is a splattered mess at times and goes about six light years over the top, but the sheer grungy scope of production design is really something to see. In deepest backwoods Americana, the murderous Firefly clan preys on, terrorizes and murders pretty much anyone who gets in their path. Bill Moseley is a Manson-esque dark angel as Otis Driftwood, renegade bad boy brother, Sheri Moon Zombie is like Harley Quinn on bath salts as Baby, who is definitely the scariest, while gargantuan Matthew McGrory, walking decrepitude grandpa (Dennis Fimple) and giggling slutwhore Mama (Karen Black doing her very best freaky Betty Boop rendition) round out the rest of the brood. They live in some cluttered rural dump right out of Hoarders™, luring unsuspecting travellers off the road and murdering them in really over elaborate, exhaustive looking ways. Oh and we see the birth of one of cinema’s most jovial and sleazy killer clowns, Sid Haig’s motor mouth Captain Spaulding, who bookends the film in uproariously raunchy comic relief. It’s a neon fever nightmare of relentless commotion, visual excess, metal music, retro Americana pop culture bliss and sadistic gore, Zombie going all out to solidify his storytelling aesthetic that would continue, in augmented, evolved ways, over the course of his brilliant career. This is certainly as obnoxious a film as you’ll find in his stable, and while it ranks in the southern end of my Zombie favourites list, there’s just no ignoring the raucous, depraved celebration of all things gross, gooey and grotesque that parades by. Not to mention the whip-smart, trashy and endlessly funny dialogue, writing being skill that the man excels in on another level. 

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Dark Moon Rising 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


You want a romantic werewolf flick that rises above the vomitus of Twilight and gives you nostalgic pangs for stuff like The Howling and Bad Moon? Dark Moon Rising is your ticket, and proves that you don’t need heaps of PG-13 gloss, mopey teen bottom feeder ‘actors’ and a vacuous script to make a young adult oriented horror film. This one is admittedly low budget and feels just south of finished in spots, but it’s well crafted, made with love and bereft of CGI. The story couldn’t be simpler: a small town girl (Ginny Weirick), her stern Sheriff father (Chris Mulkey) and the new boy in town (Chris Delvecchio) who just happens to be a werewolf. Young love is always just a stone’s throw away from danger, which arrives in the form of the boy’s dangerous, monstrous father Bender (Max Ryan) who also happens to be a werewolf. You can imagine how it goes: steamy New Mexico supernatural melodrama with a few buckets of gore tossed in and a handful of super cool genre actors. Sid Haig, Lin Shaye and Maria Conchita Alonso have wonderful extended cameos, but the standout is Billy Drago, a staple villain actor who gets to do something different here. Blessed with a reptilian visage that just demands evil behaviour from him, he’s given a sympathetic detective role here, a heartbroken lawman on the hunt for Bender to appease personal anguish. The makeup and prosthetics are terrific, retro latex nightmares that made me miss the good old days before I was born when every horror flick had to rely on the ingenuity of a hardworking team of gorehounds. Despite a few weird pacing issues (tighter editing would have been appreciated), this one is a little indie horror well worth your time. 

-Nate Hill

THE DEVIL’S REJECTS – A REVIEW BY J.D. LAFRANCE

by J.D., posted in Film Review

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In an effort to appeal to the largest audience possible, Hollywood studios have neutered so many horror films into PG-13 movies that they lack any edge or ability to scare beyond the usual fright tactics. They then release the slightly more explicit R-rated or unrated versions on DVD to exploit devotees who don’t want the sanitized theatrical version. Lions Gate, a small, independent studio, flies in the face of this trend by distributing R-rated independent and international horror movies like High Tension (2003) and Saw (2004) that push the boundaries of on-screen violence. Hard rocker turned filmmaker Rob Zombie has taken advantage of this by making and releasing his first two films through Lion’s Gate. The second of those was The Devil’s Rejects (2005), a gritty, balls-to-the-wall horror movie cum road picture – imagine The Hills Have Eyes (1977) directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Not quite a sequel to Zombie’s first movie, House of a 1000 Corpses (2003), but rather the further adventures of a few of its characters – the notorious Firefly family. Early one morning, the police raid their farm. In the ensuing chaos, Otis (Bill Moseley) and his sister Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) manage to escape with Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe) in hot pursuit and bent on revenge because they killed his brother (see House of 1000 Corpses). Otis and Baby take a country and western band by the name of Banjo & Sullivan hostage in a motel room. They eventually hook up with their partner Captain Spaudling (Sid Haig) and take refuge at a whorehouse owned by Spaudling’s brother, Charlie Altamont (Ken Foree) where they get ready for the inevitable confrontation with Wydell.

When Zombie wrote House of 1000 Corpses, he had a “vague idea” for a story about the brother of the sheriff that the Firefly clan killed coming back for revenge. He did this just in case the film did well enough at the box office and created interest in another film. After Lions Gate made back all of their money on the first day of Corpses theatrical release, the studio wanted Zombie to make another film and he started to seriously think about a new story. With Rejects, he wanted to make it more horrific and the characters less cartoonish than in Corpses. He was interested in making “something that was almost like a violent western” and has cited films like The Wild Bunch (1969), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Badlands (1973) as influences.

Zombie hired Phil Parmet, who had shot the legendary documentary Harlan County USA (1976) because he wanted to adopt a hand-held camera/documentary look. To prepare for the film, Parmet watched many horror films but when he and Zombie started talking about the approach they wanted to take on Rejects, they actually connected on revisionist westerns like Hang ‘Em High (1968), Monte Walsh (1970), and El Topo (1970). They also looked to films like The French Connection (1971), In Cold Blood (1967), and Fat City (1972) for inspiration. During pre-production, they decided to shoot the film on 16mm and Zombie cited films like Amores Perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003) as jumping off points for how he wanted to shoot his own film. Zombie told Parmet that he wanted to use two cameras at all time and for certain scenes, like the chaotic gunfight at the Firefly house at the beginning of the film, to have as many as six cameras running simultaneously.

Zombie populated his cast with an impressive collection of B-horror character actors: Sid Haig (Spider Baby), Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead), P.J. Soles (Halloween), and Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes). They are not cast for kitsch or novelty value but because they have the acting chops to pull off these meaty roles. Zombie cast actors with interesting faces that have character. Every line or glint in their eyes says so much and he captures them in close-ups a la Sergio Leone. And no one personifies a fascinating face more than Sid Haig who plays Captain Spaulding as the scariest clown with evil make-up that includes black lips and horrible yellow teeth augmenting his already grizzled looks.

After starring in numerous forgettable direct-to-video efforts, William Forsythe finally gets a substantial role. Every once in a while, he pops up in a mainstream film, like Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead (1995) and The Rock (1996), usually playing some generic bad guy role. He harkens back to a bygone era of tough guys, like Lee Marvin or Robert Shaw, who naturally exuded a ferocious intensity that is exciting to watch. With his deep, gravelly voice Forsythe plays an unstoppable force of nature that is just as ruthless in his methods as the Firefly clan.

The dialogue crackles and pops with its own profane rhythm. The tough guy-speak works because it is believable and the actors deliver it with conviction. Zombie breaks it up with some very funny bits and truly laugh-out-loud moments of black humor. For example, the Firefly clan uses aliases of names of Groucho Marx characters. To crack this code, Wydell brings in movie critic Marty Walker (Robert Trebor) and they end up getting into an argument about the merits of Elvis Presley movies that is hilarious and helps relieve some of the unrelenting tension that this film generates.

The Devil’s Rejects is a good looking movie that features a lush glow of reds, greens and blues during the night scenes and then Zombie cuts to one with a minimalist single light source with nothing in the background so that we focus on the two actors in the scene and what they are saying. In contrast, the day scenes have a warm, saturated sun-burnt look. The darkest scene in the movie in terms of tonality actually takes place at high noon and this makes it even more sinister because there is nowhere to hide.

Zombie references all kinds of movies and not just the usual horror movies that other filmmakers quote. When he does refer to other films he does so in a subtle way and not in a look-how-clever-I-am way that Quentin Tarantino does. Tarantino is a cinematic show-off content to sample his favorite scenes from other movies without showing any kind of understanding about how they work. The Devil’s Rejects is a down ‘n’ dirty celebration of outlaw 1970s cinema complete with a fantastic score of southern rock classics from the likes of the Allman Brothers Band, Joe Walsh and Lynyrd Skynyrd. In case of the last band, the way their anthem “Free Bird” is used in this movie is incredible. What could have been so clichéd comes across as a poignant and iconic scene in the film, befitting the song itself.

devilsrejects2This film does not quite look like it was shot in the ‘70s but made by someone who grew up in that decade. Rejects was made by a horror film fan for horror film fans. Zombie has created a truly disturbing horror movie with no real redeemable characters, that is refreshingly unpredictable and this is what makes it so scary, like the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Both movies are feverish nightmares except that in Massacre you felt sympathy for the female protagonist. The Devil’s Rejects does not even have that. You may find yourself rooting for the Firefly family early on but Zombie quickly rejects this notion by portraying them as truly irredeemable people. There is no sappy love story or cop-out ending and this remains true to many of the nihilistic movies of the ‘70s. Horror film obsessives always brace themselves for the wimp out ending — it is the downfall of so many horror films — Rejects does not make this mistake. Zombie has shown a real growth as a filmmaker, creating I daresay a modern horror masterpiece.