Spooktober II Review #31 - The Shining

The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick

"God, I'd give anything for a drink. I'd give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer."

How appropriate that my final review of Spooktober II is my favorite movie of all time, The Shining. If you have ever had a conversation with me about movies, there's no doubt that I've brought it up and told you how I think it's perfect, and how perfection is so rare in film. Maybe that's how everyone feels about their favorite movie, and I'm willing to admit that it doesn't HAVE to be everyone's objectively favorite film, but what makes it so special to me? 

I've seen The Shining many times throughout my life. I can still remember the first time, when I watched a VHS copy on an old CRT television while my parents were out grocery shopping on a Sunday morning. It must've made an impact, because I can still remember little details about when I watched it, and how the movie sucked me in. When my parents came home, they weren't exactly sure why I chose to watch The Shining on a Sunday morning nowhere near Halloween, and they seemed noncommittal about their love for it. This likely had more to do with fighting crowds at the grocery store than a true dispassion, but I can still remember feeling slightly wounded, because I was hooked from the jump, and I couldn't fathom someone else not feeling as excited about it.

The true impact of The Shining didn't really hit until I saw it on the big screen, with incredibly rich and loud sound. At the time, I was working as a social worker in a children's hospital and regularly met women and children who were in similar situations as Wendy and Danny. My first experience as a social work intern in 2010 was at a clinic in Michigan that did court-mandated assessments and group therapy for male offenders of domestic violence. I was trained to recognize the symptoms of power and control in an intimate partner relationship, and the tactics that male abusers use against their partners. 

That knowledge helped shape my deep appreciation for the honesty of the film's depiction of domestic violence. I've heard people claim that Jack Nicholson is "chewing the scenery" and Shelly Duvall looks and sounds ridiculous throughout the film (she was even nominated for a Razzie for worst actress in 1980), but those people have either never spoken to offenders/survivors of domestic violence, or are minimizing the effectiveness of the performances out of discomfort. The Shining means a lot of different things to different people, but for me it's first and foremost an honest and frightening study of domestic violence.

Let's jump right in with an easy example, and then we'll break things down as we go along:

In the director's cut of the film, there's a scene near the beginning when Danny passes out after Tony (the imaginary friend that speaks to Danny) shows him the bleeding elevator in the hotel. Wendy has a doctor come to the house to check him out, and they have a conversation in the living room about when Danny started talking to Tony. This is a scene I've lived in my professional life countless times: Wendy explains that Danny first talked to Tony after he was hurt a couple of years ago when his arm was broken by Jack. She says that Jack came home after drinking too much, saw that young Danny had thrown his papers around the room, and pulled on his arm to get him away from the mess. Wendy explains it as "the sort of thing you do to a child a thousand times," but that this was the time that her child's arm broke. She dismisses the potential threat going forward, because Jack promised never to drink again, and has now been sober for months. This is where Kubrick ends the scene and cuts to a long landscape shot, allowing the audience to process Wendy's faulty timeline. Jack hurt Danny years ago, but has only been sober for months. She is making the sorts of excuses innumerable women make in an effort to survive and keep their families together.

Jack's explanation of this incident later on in the film takes a different tone, but with a similar result:

He starts his imaginary therapy session with a non-existent bartender by claiming he never hurt Danny, but reflects on the broken arm situation Wendy described earlier in the film. Jack says the problem was "a momentary loss of muscular coordination" shortly after calling his son a "little fucker" and pantomiming just how hard he did yank Danny up off the floor. This is what we call minimizing, denying, and blaming.

If you're not familiar with the cycle of domestic violence and the power and control wheel, we'll do a little crash course:

This is the power and control wheel, and it does a good job of laying out all of the tactics that male abusers use against their partners. It's not an exhaustive list of the sort of abusive things that an intimate partner can use, but it's a good teaching tool to help survivors understand these signs and symptoms going forward. I should have handed these out before my showing of The Shining this year, because Jack hits every spoke of the wheel throughout the film.

Minimizing, Denying, and Blaming is the most challenging subject for male offenders who are in treatment to process effectively. The hardest thing someone can do is admit how wrong they were, especially when it comes to something so shameful as abuse toward a woman or child, and it takes a lot of work to make progress on this front. In the scene above, Jack is clearly locked into his cycle of denial. He denies that he ever hurt Danny (which is a blatant lie), gives in a little to say that maybe he hurt him once but only unintentionally (minimizing), and that really it was Danny's fault to begin with because the little fucker was making a mess (blaming).

The setup to that clip is Wendy finding Danny covered in bruises and with a ripped shirt, sucking his thumb. She logically blames Jack and lashes out at him (who else could have harmed Danny?), but is willing to give Jack another chance after Danny tells her (off screen) that a woman in Room 237 harmed him. Here's the payoff when Wendy tells Jack about it:

This is a classic example of emotional abuse. Jack's story is that he didn't hurt Danny, but he knows that Danny is covered in bruises. Wendy tells him that someone else is still at the hotel and harmed his son, but this is his response to his panicked wife. Does this mean Jack actually did hurt Danny, perhaps while 'shining' with the hotel? Maybe. It doesn't really matter, because Jack believes himself to be innocent, but is still not willing to listen to his wife when she presents an alternative explanation. He hates her, he doesn't respect her, and and he's lashing out. The derision he feels towards Wendy supersedes anything else going on in his life. It takes over the logic centers of his brain, and all that's left is rage and disgust.

Here's another good example of Jack's feelings toward Wendy when she's just trying to be nice and have a conversation with her husband:

As we learn later in the film, Jack isn't able to write anything of substance, and is just typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again. There's no small amount of shame inherent in domestic violence, which can cause rage. Here, Jack is ashamed that he can't get over his writer's block, and finds a way to blame Wendy for his failings, lashing out at her in a wildly inappropriate (but brutally realistic) way.

The story of the woman who attacked Danny doesn't make a lot of sense on its face, because the family is so isolated. Jack's decision to take this crazy job as the caretaker of a secluded hotel has put his family in the middle of nowhere. Logically, how could there be another person in the hotel after so much time has passed? But Wendy is distraught by her son's injury and story, and turns to the only other person she can: her abusive husband. That's why it's an effective abusive tactic. If Wendy had any other options, she would have pursued them, but Jack has designed the situation to keep her reliant on him and him alone, even though he hates her and her 'interruptions.'

You get a sense for her isolation in a few other scenes as well. In the scene where she talks to the forest ranger over the radio, she seems desperate to carry on a conversation with him about anything at all. The ranger is the first person besides Jack and Danny who she's spoken to since Dick Halloran took her on a tour of the kitchen at the beginning of the film. There's also a palpable loneliness in the scene that Wendy has with the doctor in their home. She has no other friends or family for support during a trying time, and their tiny house doesn't look particularly great for entertaining. There's also the scene where Wendy and Danny are watching TV in the lobby of the hotel, and she has a flat, distant stare that seems well-practiced. She's used to feeling lonely and isolated, and she can sense Jack's rage building like a storm on the horizon.

Jack's use of male privilege and economic abuse are more subtle, but some of my favorite understated things in the whole film. Jack says he wants this caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel because it will allow him time to work on his novel while also earning money. It doesn't seem like a particularly complicated job: he has to make sure the boiler keeps working and some other light housekeeping duties. That's pretty much it. And yet, by the last act of the film, after only a month or two of being in the hotel, Wendy has fully taken on his duties without a discussion. 

It seems likely that Wendy does not usually work while at home (if Kubrick wanted us to know that she had a job, he would have included something about it in the film) keeping her economically tied to Jack. If they don't do their job here, they probably won't get paid, and the family will be in dire financial straits. Wendy understands this, so she takes up his daily tasks while he sleeps off yet another imaginary hangover.

When she tells Jack, after Danny has been attacked, that they should try to leave the hotel and make it to the nearest town in the snow car, Jack flips out:

Jack is forcefully adamant that he has responsibilities at the hotel and that he has chosen to take on this important job. But he's not actually doing any of the work! If he were a reasonable man in an equal partnership with his wife, he might be able to work out a compromise, but this is not a partnership. If Wendy leaves the hotel, who's going to do all his work for him while he sleeps and "writes his novel?"

He's the man, she's the woman, and she absolutely must be there to pick up his slack, no matter what other circumstances might arise...including the eroding physical and mental health of his only child.


The Shining is such a layered film. While we've explored how Jack fits the profile of an abusive husband to a T, there's more going on here that Kubrick weaves into the story so masterfully. I particularly like the scene where the manager of the hotel is taking Jack and Wendy on a short tour of the facilities, and explains that the hotel was built on an Indian burial ground, and that the construction workers had to fight off a few waves of Native attacks while trying to build it. This hotel, the western states, and frankly all of the United States were literally founded and built on violence, just like Jack and Wendy's relationship.

The documentary Room 237 (which you should totally see if you're a fan of The Shining at all) presents a number of theories as to the true meaning of The Shining. A couple are pretty outlandish and funny (that this is Kubrick's admission of guilt that he helped film the fake moon landing, or that it's a retelling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur) but one sticks out as probably having a kernel of truth: an examination of the genocide of the American Indian.

While I don't think Kubrick made the film solely about the extermination of Native Americans, the idea is there, and he teases at it throughout the film. There's lots of Native art on the walls, there's the explicit mention of the burial ground, and there's even the recurring shots of Calumet baking powder in the background:

There's a history of violence to the United States that we, as a society, have collectively decided to minimize our role in, deny that it ever happened, or blame the Natives for their role in it. It's not the central story of the film, but it's definitely part of the same theme. 

I'd even argue that Grady's use of the n-word to describe Dick Halloran is another example of the inherent violence to the American experience. Racism is a distinct and insidious form of violence, and the way he spits the word out gives it extra weight. It's a jarring scene, and always elicits some uncomfortable murmuring when it happens, but it has a distinct purpose. Kubrick was a genius obsessed with detail and perfection. There's nothing added to his films that wasn't meant to convey some sort of message or build upon the world he's created.


Another layer I love about The Shining is the power of addiction. It's also not a central plot point, but Jack's alcoholism is a powerful motivator and personal excuse for a lot of his behavior. This is also where Kubrick elevates the film above the source novel by Stephen King.

King's novel uses Jack's alcoholism as a plot device throughout, because addiction is something that King himself was dealing with in the 1970's when he wrote it. Maybe King doesn't particularly like the movie because it pushes the alcoholism into the background, making it a fuzzy static that adds to Jack's character, but doesn't wholly control him. Stephen King wants to blame all of his negative emotions, abuse, and self-doubt on his addictions, and this is common. 

The brilliant social worker who taught and guided me through my first internship had a great response when men would say that they only hit their wife/girlfriend/whoever because they were drunk or high. She would say, "how many beers did it take before you hit your girlfriend," and they would answer. She'd then ask, "how many beers would it take before you'd have sex with your grandmother," and they would contort their faces and exclaim that no amount of alcohol could ever get them to that place, because it's such a disgusting and improper act. And there's the lesson: fucking your grandma is abhorrent and completely unacceptable, but beating the mother of your children is not. Alcohol isn't the reason abuse happens, it's just the excuse.

I think that idea makes Stephen King uncomfortable (the novel mentions that there's cooking sherry in the hotel, and it's presumed that's how Jack is getting drunk and why he's doing all these bad things), but it's something that Kubrick doesn't shy away from. In the film, Jack can't get alcohol. There's not a drop to be found, and he certainly couldn't bring any from home without Wendy knowing. So in his desperation, he has to invent (or shine) a bartender to help him deal with his problems, and to excuse his upcoming behavior. He's coping like a child: just as Danny has Tony, Jack has Lloyd the bartender.

King ends the novel with Jack resisting the temptation to murder his family, and blowing up himself and the hotel by not maintaining the boiler. King believed that there was a goodness inside of Jack that was kept down by alcoholism and self-doubt. When Jack hits bottom (trying to murder his wife and child) he gets a glimpse of what he's become and has a presto-chango desire to be a good man. Kubrick understands that the journey toward recovery is long, painful, and requires a lot of help. Completely isolated from the outside world, and with a healthy supply of enablers (both imagined and real), it's unlikely Jack would be able to achieve recovery on his own. It's a darker, but more honest interpretation of the story.


So is Jack actually getting drunk in the film? Maybe. There's an undeniable supernatural element to the film, and the shine of the hotel has the power to manipulate some objects (it's how Jack is able to get out of the locked pantry near the end of the film), but since we don't see either Lloyd or a drink in Jack's hand when Wendy finds him at the bar, I believe he's just imagining it out of sheer desperation. 

So does the hotel want Jack to kill his family, like in the novel? Or does the hotel just have a strong shine that Jack is in tune with, and his consumption of imaginary alcohol unlocking the deep, dark thoughts he has tucked away in his brain after months of cabin fever? Great questions that don't really have a true answer. It comes down to how optimistic you are about the human condition. For me, I always assumed Jack just needed a nudge that the violent imagery that the hotel can shine provided.

This is also a good time to discuss the process of 'shining.' Mr. Halloran explains it to Danny and to the audience after the Torrence family arrives at the Overlook. It's where we realize that Mr. Halloran is afraid of the hotel, and that Danny has a powerful gift, perhaps even more powerful than Halloran's. We also learn that the ability to shine might be hereditary, since Halloran says that he and his grandmother could have a whole conversation without ever opening their mouths. Because of this, it's safe to assume that both Wendy and Jack have the ability to shine, and have passed it on to Danny.

But since the Torrence family does not cope well with problems, they all deal with their gift (or curse) in different ways. Jack tries to write, but ends up drinking to dull the voices; Wendy pours herself into Danny, but often seems to disconnect or disassociate, sublimating her gift into a desire to just keep the peace; and Danny has Tony, who is the voice of Danny's gift, but is a distinct personality brought about by the trauma of being abused by Jack a couple of years ago.

While people without the shine can probably spend time in the Overlook Hotel without incident (there have been many caretakers, and only two have gone wacky), the Torrence's aren't that lucky, and the hotel is able to manipulate Jack's mind to fulfill his darkest desires. It's not even like the hotel has to work all that hard. All it took was two fake drinks and a bathroom conversation with Delbert Grady (the former caretaker who hacked his family to pieces with an axe) to send Jack over the edge. Even without the hotel's influence, a forgotten bottle of whiskey and time would have achieved the same effect.



There are so many other things worth mentioning about The Shining, especially about the filmcraft, the production design choices, the pacing, and the way Kubrick handled his performers, but this has gone on long enough, and other reviewers have gone into detail on all of those things more ably than I could. So I'll just say that if you haven't watched The Shining before, or if it's been a while and you don't really remember it, tonight's the night. You'll be dazzled and scared and staggered, and you'll hopefully have the same sort of feelings I did watching it on a bright, happy Sunday afternoon so many years ago.

It's a masterpiece, the best film I've watched all month, and will probably remain my favorite movie forever. It's a perfect film, made by a director at the top of his craft, who was totally in control, and working on levels that people are still trying to unpack 37 years later. 

Spooktober II Review #30 - Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead (1968)
George Romero

"Yeah they're dead. They're all messed up."

For the penultimate Spooktober II review, I've decided to do another podcast/commentary track. After showing Night of the Living Dead at the Five Hours of Terror event, I thought it might be more fun to do an audio recap rather than writing up something.

So I watched the movie for a second time and recorded this:

http://badmoviepodcast.libsyn.com/night-of-the-living-dead-commentary

If you want to watch the movie with me, you can follow along by watching the whole film in HD at this YouTube link:

https://youtu.be/-_f2Enn8x5s

If you just want to listen to it as a podcast, you should be able to. There are a few long-ish pauses as I wait for something to happen on screen, but I do a lot of blathering about other things as well (my America-hating leftist politics, mostly), so it's not totally necessary that you have it on.

Hope you enjoy, and I'll see you back here tomorrow for my final review of the year, and on Wednesday for my 2017 Awards Show.

Spooktober II Review #29 - Slumber Party Massacre

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
Amy Jones

"You know you want it. You'll love it."

I'm not mad at Slumber Party Massacre, I'm just...disappointed. I watched it tonight on a whim, mainly because of the goofy title and the fact that it's only 76 minutes long. At first glance, it seems like a standard 80's schlock slasher flick, and in many ways it is, but it's unique among the field by being both written and directed by women. The woman who wrote it, Rita Mae Brown, is a novelist, poet, screenwriter, feminist activist, and lesbian. The director, Amy Jones, is an established screenwriter, director, and editor in her own right. In fact, she had a choice: make Slumber Party Massacre or edit E.T., and she decided to take on the bigger challenge. It was too enticing not to watch.

Unfortunately, the studio got a hold of Brown's script, and changed it from a parody of slashers into something more straightforward. Had the film been directed by some Cannon Films scumbag like Michael Winner (who infamously wouldn't let Marina Sirtis cover up her bare breasts while in between shots during a disgusting rape scene in an ice cold warehouse) I'm sure the film would have devolved into something completely irredeemable. As it stands, it's not great, but there are some parts, especially close to the end, that are funny and insightful.

The story here is as simple as possible, and yet I spent the first half of the movie confused (most of the actresses look alike). The parents of a teen girl, Trish, are going out of town, and are leaving her alone at the house. She decides this is a good time to throw a slumber party, and invite her three friends over for some beer, pizza, and tacked on nudity. All of the girls are on the school's basketball team, along with new student and star player Valerie, who the other girls don't particularly like (because she's a good student and good at basketball). Valerie is also next-door-neighbors with Trish, so she'll be forced to listen to their fun all night.

In the midst of this, various radio broadcasts inform the audience (and the oblivious characters) that an escaped murderer named Russ Thorn is on the loose. Thorn's weapon of choice is a large drill, that he uses to penetrate his victims. If the symbolism isn't clear by this point, maybe this scene will help:

Watch until 46:07

So yeah, some of that clever feminist scriptwriting held on to the final cut, but it sure takes a while for it to hit. The first act is nothing but tits, and horny boys, and killing. There's so much more they could have done here, but whatever humor and insight he screenplay had here was sanded down into a dull boob-filled teen romp.

Luckily the third act fleshes out the characters a little more, and modifies Russ Thorn into a more explicit rapist, making a commentary about men in general. All of the male characters in the movie are worthless, it turns out. They are sex-crazed dullards who die easily once Thorn needs to get them out of the way. 

You know what happens in the middle: teen girls giggling, drinking, smoking pot, getting undressed around each other (for some reason), and murder. Thorn is a pretty creepy villain all things considered. The actor playing him does a good job as a quiet psychopath, and it's nice that he's not a masked figure nor does he have some horrible disfigurement. He's an average guy, which means he's a big threat to women.

Eventually Valerie realizes something strange is going on at Trish's house and shows up to investigate. She finds a corpse stuffed into the fridge (which is a pretty impressive stunt by the actress!), and comes face-to-face with Thorn.

Valerie, easily the most empowered character in the film, arms herself with a machete and takes the fight to Thorn. This is a genuinely great scene, with some solid symbolism:

Watch however long you want. What do I care?

But once Thorn is dead, that's kind of it. It fades to black as you hear sirens in the distance. Pretty disappointing, but not unexpected by how quickly the movie speeds through anything that's not killing or nudity.

That's a good description of the movie in general: disappointing. There's enough here to delight the weirdos who only want tits via any means necessary, but the kills aren't particularly amazing (until Thorn gets hacked apart at the end), and you don't care enough about the characters to tell them apart (the giant 80's hairstyles don't help either).

I wish I could see the original screenplay, because there's such a missed opportunity here. Why not have a locker room scene with a bunch of guys hanging dong and playing up their homoeroticism? Have the girls stay one step ahead of the male murderer without really trying. Have the girls realize the power of collective empowerment, and allow them to team up against Thorn more. Heck, redo the whole thing and make the murderer a girl who drills into sex-crazed teen boys! I know Rita Mae Brown had something special in the original script, but it's forever lost to time due to craven male studio executives.

Summary:

It's not the worst thing I've ever seen, and at least it's not lazy and spiteful. There's an intelligence to it that I appreciate, but it's a shame that it only flashes through in a couple of spots. If you're a fan of the slasher genre, give it a whirl. But if you're expecting something with solid bite, temper your expectations.

You can watch it for free on Amazon Video, but honestly, the YouTube video I've been using for clips is a much higher quality transfer.

Oh, last and least: this movie is exactly as old as I am. It was released on November 12, 1982. And we've both aged horribly.

Spooktober II Review #28 - A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Jack Sholder

"Help yourself, fucker!"

Last night I had the opportunity to see Rear Window on the big screen, presented by a local movie group here in Grand Rapids called Cinema Lab. It was great to see it in a theater, and the discussion afterward was pleasantly illuminating, but I don't think I can stretch enough to call it a horror movie. 

With only 4 more reviews to go, I needed to come up with something to watch, and since it was late, I thought it should be goofy. Since I haven't watched any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies yet this year, I asked an online random number generator to pick one for me, and it decided on #2 in its infinite digital wisdom. So here we are.

If you've never seen Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street, that's an easy recommend. It's a little sloppy at times, but the idea of a murderer who attacks you in your sleep is brilliant, and the dreamlike quality to the film really adds to the experience. Freddy became one of the all-time great movie monsters in just one film, and you can't beat the practical effects on the brutal kills:

Wes Craven had no intention of turning A Nightmare on Elm Street into a series, and wanted the original to have a happy ending (the scene at the end with Nancy's mom being sucked back in through the door was suggested by a producer as sequel bait), so there wasn't a lot of guidance on what to do with the sequels, and it shows with Part 2.

Freddy as a character has had an interesting progression. In the first movie, he's a genuinely terrifying psychopath who attacks children in their dreams. In Part 3 and beyond, he's a bit like a cartoonish supervillain, who kills teens in increasingly goofy ways while dropping one-liners. But in Part 2, I don't think the filmmakers knew what they had with Freddy, and he's almost completely wasted. I mean, he's barely in the movie until the very end, and that part is borderline embarrassing.

The basic story of Part 2 is that a new family has moved into 1428 Elm Street, and Freddy begins haunting the dreams of the teenage boy (Jesse, played by Mark Patton) who is now sleeping in Nancy's old bedroom. When Freddy comes to Jesse in his dreams, it's not to kill him, but to recruit him to help kill teens in the real world. Why? Who fucking knows, because it's never explained why Freddy suddenly needs a conduit.

Jesse resists Freddy for as long as he can, but eventually lets his guard down, and starts hacking and slashing his way through the school. Initially he kills his gym teacher, but moves on to his friend, and some other kids at a party. Well, maybe it's Jesse...

During each kill, his victims see him as Freddy, not Jesse, and by the end, it turns out that Jesse is living physically inside of Freddy (and vice versa). The story might have been more successful if Freddy was just controlling his mind, but I guess why bother paying Robert Englund all that money if you're not going to use Freddy, right?

The story culminates in Freddy attacking a bunch of teens at a pool party, in one of the most embarrassing scenes in any slasher film ever:

How is it that every single extra is the worst actor ever? I've never seen anything quite like it.

Eventually, Jesse's girlfriend leads Freddy to the factory where he worked when he was alive, and she kisses him. This is evidently Freddy's weakness, because he bursts into flame and Jesse climbs out of the crispy husk. They look like they'll happily ever after (despite his fingerprints being all over several murder scenes), but Freddy comes back at the end to provide more sequel bait in a scene that mirrors the end of the first one. It's super dumb.

Luckily there are a few bizarre things that I loved about Part 2, and I think make it worth watching. A lot of it stems from the lack of communication between the director and the writer, which resulted in some hilarious weirdness. You can tell the screenplay was a lot more cheeky and humorous than the direction.

Right off the bat, we have one of the best fake products in any movie:

Fu Man Chews! The greatest movie cereal box since Mr. T Cereal in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The only reason it's here is because the free toy inside are red "Fu Man Fingers" which look like Freddy's claws when the little girl puts them on. It's a long way to go for a dumb gag, and that box is impossibly distracting. I mean, just look at it! I want it on a poster.

Next is the infamous bird attack scene:

Why does this happen? Did Freddy take over one of the parakeets? Why does it explode at the end? I think this is supposed to be scary, but it doesn't play as scary. It plays as laughably ridiculous.

The very ending is also completely absurd:

A day or two after a pool party where a hellish demon murdered like five children and maimed several others, this is all the dramatic gravitas we can muster:

"I can't believe it's all over."

"Let's not talk about it."

"K."

The thing I love most about Part 2, and probably the only reason people still talk about it, is the gay subtext of Jesse's character. Mark Patton, an openly gay actor, proudly calls himself the first "scream queen" in a slasher film. He read the screenplay and understood the not-so-nuanced homosexual undertones, and embraced it with his character. The director clearly did not. He blocked and shot this scene (which was in the screenplay, in detail) and still treated Jesse like he was straight:

But that's not all:

• Jesse/Freddy's first kill of the film, the murder of his gym teacher, involves naked male bondage in a steamy shower, complete with welt-leaving towel snapping on some bare buttocks. 

• The "Scream Queen" moniker comes from Jesse's high-pitched shrieks throughout the film. 

• Jesse's one potential sexual encounter with his girlfriend ends before it begins, and he runs out of the room.

None of this is meant as a slight on Jesse's character, or the homosexual subtext of the film. In fact, I wish Jack Sholder had been on the same page as screenwriter David Chaskin, because it would have been a more interesting film to have Freddy represent Jesse's repressed homosexuality. Instead, it's just a lot of confused filmmaking and unrealized potential that adds to the amateur cheesiness of it all.

Summary:

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (which is an annoyingly long title) is a bad movie. It's not the worst movie ever, and it's under 90 minutes, so it might be worth watching if you're interested in what a movie looks like when the director never has a conversation with the screenwriter. It's not a great movie to watch if you love Freddy, however. He's only in it briefly, and he hasn't yet evolved into the gory Looney Tunes character he'd become in Part 3 and beyond.

Still, there's enough here to keep you laughing with a friend over a few beers on a cold October night.

Spooktober II Review #27 - Maximum Overdrive

Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Stephen King

"This machine just called me an asshole!"

I'm a big fan of Stephen King. He's come up with some of the best horror stories in history, and wrote one of my favorite books of all time, The Stand. I love how unhinged he was, especially early on in his career. He wrote his first novel, Carrie, while locked up in a mobile home, drinking and doing coke for weeks. He had to plug his nose with wadded up toilet paper to stop bleeding all over the typewriter. He's a true mad genius.

He was also a bit eccentric. In many of his novels, King uses a lot of autobiographical elements. The Shining is great example. King was a desperate alcoholic, resented his family, and worked as a school teacher while wanting to be a novelist. He imagined having to be locked up with his wife and child in total seclusion, thought about the strain that would cause to him, and The Shining was born. 

When Stanley Kubrick, another insane genius, bought the rights to adapt the novel into a film, he would pester King constantly, once calling King at 2 AM to ask him if he believed in God. This, along with Kubrick removing Jack's redemption from the story, left a bad taste in King's mouth, and he has always openly expressed his disappointment in a film that I consider to be the finest film ever made.

Maybe that's what inspired King to try and tackle filmmaking himself, because in 1986 he decided to direct the film adaptation of his short story Trucks, about murderous, self-driving big rigs. Powered by an insane amount of cocaine and with absolutely no directorial skill whatsoever, he thrust Maximum Overdrive onto the world in 1986.

It's such a weird balls-to-the-wall style movie. Instead of buying a cheap derelict truckstop in the middle of nowhere, the production built one from the ground up, just so that they could tear it down during filming. There are so many big stunts and crazy explosions, and at least a dozen semis are blown to bits. The coke-fueled filmmaking was also a threat to life and limb. During one shot, a remote controlled lawnmower went rogue and ran over a chunk of wood, sending a splinter into the Director of Photography's eye (which he lost). In another scene, a cameraman was almost crushed by an ice cream truck, after the attempt to flip it over went awry. He was pulled away at the last second. Insanity from top to bottom.

King also managed to get AC/DC to provide the entire soundtrack for the film. I'm not entirely sure how he pulled it off, but they produced both original tracks and allowed use of their classics. It's not exactly an inappropriate soundtrack, but it does lend a certain goofiness when watching it in 2017. AC/DC has long since traveled down the long, dusty road toward grandpa rock, and hearing Hell's Bells blaring against the backdrop of possessed trucks crushing bible salesmen in a truckstop parking lot makes the whole thing extra silly.

The story is completely ridiculous. We get some expositional text at the beginning to tell us that a passing comet has left Earth shrouded in the mysterious energy of its tail for 8 days. The strange space energy causes machines on the planet to develop their own autonomous personalities, ranging from petty jerks to homicidal maniacs. 

This is such a great way to introduce the kind of craziness we're heading toward:

The rest of the story, like most Stephen King stories, focuses on a small group of disparate characters holed up together in an everyday place, trying to survive an inexplicable crisis. In this case, everyone's hiding in a backwoods truckstop in North Carolina run by a cigar chomping good ol' boy named Bubba. The crew is mostly truckers, but there's also a waitress, a couple of pump jockeys, and line-cook Bill (played by Emilio Estevez). As the story develops, we're also introduced to a young boy and a newly married couple (the new bride played by Yeardley Smith, better known as Lisa Simpson) who are also trying to escape the terror. 

Obviously the trucks are the main villain of Maximum Overdrive, but the film makes it clear that every machine is capable of being affected by the comet's energy. A waitress is attacked by an electric knife, a man is called an asshole by an ATM, lawn sprinklers go on and off by themselves, and a steamroller attacks a little league game:

This scene was originally supposed to have a bag of blood in the child dummy that would leave a red streak on the roller, but it burst all at once, making it look like the child's head exploded as it was crushed. A coked out Stephen King was delighted by the unexpected result, but the scene didn't survive the censors, and it was cut from the film. You can kind of tell by how quickly that shot ends. It's too bad. That would be an all-timer in schlocky 80's B-horror deaths.

My favorite death in the movie is when the little league coach is killed via pop machine:

The kids trying to get away from the pop cans with some getting mowed down is just outstanding.

I can suspend disbelief for certain machines, but some just don't make any sense whatsoever. Like, how do sprinklers go on and off by themselves? They're not machines. How does a hair dryer strangle a woman to death? The rest of the machines that come to life are still bound by the limits of Earthly physics, but that one clearly had the ability to wrap itself tightly around her neck. And some machines just never come to life. The car that the married couple are driving in never goes crazy, despite ample opportunities to kill them. Bubba's car, which is parked right in front of the truckstop, also never wakes up, and is later destroyed by a maniac bulldozer. The machines also somehow figure out how to mount a machine gun onto a golf cart and use that to murder and terrorize the survivors. There's no cohesiveness to the central conceit of the movie.

The movie tries to imply that there's a collective intelligence to the machines, as Emilio Estevez whispers to one of the trucks about all the diesel he can give them, and trucks from all over line up to get refueled. The movie plays fast and loose with the rules, and every plot point is just another excuse to film a blood-filled dummy getting rammed by a Mack truck. Like King said himself, this is definitely a moron movie.

Led by Bill, our characters have the bright idea to make a run for the marina, so they can steal a sailboat and head for a small island off the coast of North Carolina that doesn't allow motorized vehicles (like Mackinac Island, I guess). They make a mad dash to the shore, defeat a possessed ice cream truck in the most anti-climactic climax in history, and board the sailboat. The original script had our heroes fighting off a motorized Coast Guard boat with mounted weaponry, but that was cut out in favor of...this:

What? UFO? Soviet weather satellite? Laser cannon? Nothing about what happened to the machines? Was the UFO controlling all the trucks? This is so confusing.

Either the money ran out, or the coke did, because Maximum Overdrive has the most absurdly abrupt ending since this:

Why not just end the movie with the characters being run over by an ocean freighter? Or just end it with the sailboat heading into the sunset. Anything but a nonsensical postscript.

But maybe that adds to the strange charm of Maximum Overdrive, right? It wouldn't be a hilarious schlock-filled B-movie without something truly incompetent, and the ending definitely qualifies.

Summary:

Stephen King says he's ashamed of Maximum Overdrive, but that probably has more to do with his raging addiction than the quality of the film. It's goofy fun and easier to enjoy now than in 1986. If you're jonesing for weird 80's schlock or some pounding dad rock, watch Maximum Overdrive. If you want something like this, only done well, watch Tremors instead.

Spooktober II Review #26 - Life

Life (2017)
Daniel Espinosa

"Goodnight, nobody."

Have you ever seen the movie Alien? Yeah? Cool. Then you've seen Life.

Well, sorta.

Before I get into spoilers, Life is a pretty good sci-fi/horror flick set in space that apes a lot of what Alien (and a hundred other movies) have already done, but manages to avoid feeling like a complete waste of time. It's carried by some solid performances by the cast, good special effects (despite being mostly CGI), and a few dark twists that keep it interesting.

The plot is simple enough. Astronauts on the International Space Station analyze some martian soil samples brought back by an unmanned probe and find a single cellular lifeform. The team's resident microbiologist revives the martian cell with some TLC, and everyone's obviously excited. But of course things go horribly wrong.

From here on out, I'm going to discuss spoilers, so skip to the summary if you plan on seeing it.

----------------SPOILERS BELOW HERE-----------------

Life is probably best described as a combination of Alien and Gravity. There's a lot of running from and fighting a space monster, but their environment is just as much of an enemy. Systems break down, characters have to travel outside the spacecraft, and there's a lot of plate-spinning with things like orbit degradation and life support necessities.

I'll admit, there was a lot of shouting at the screen at the beginning of the movie, because there's no mystery to what's about to happen. When the microbiologist starts touching the small, but growing, martian blob you're waiting for it to lash out and take over his brain or something. It doesn't happen right away, which is fine, but the thrill is lost when it finally does make its move. Still, instead of biting him or spraying him with space acid, it wraps itself around his hand and crushes it like a pop can, snapping his fingers backward in a delightfully disgusting scene.

There's an understanding of quarantine and protocol among the characters, which is nice. All of them are pulling in the same direction. There's no android saboteur to gum up the works, and nobody makes a staggeringly stupid decision. It's a fairly realistic take on the genre.

The martian monster is pretty cool, for being a CGI blob. The CGI use, especially at the beginning of the film, is understated and well done. It gets a little cartoony near the end, but by that point, we're more interested in the characters trying to find a solution to the problem than the monster itself. Still, give me a slimy rubber alien any day.

I also enjoy that the blob monster has a name. The children of Earth voted on naming the cell once the news broke that life was discoverd in martian soil, and came up with the name Calvin after an elementary school where the winning name was thought up. It's the sort of dopey thing that would happen if a real martian cellular organism was discovered. It also lends a certain goofiness to the monster, since they can refer to it by name.

After Calvin attacks the microbiologist and gets loose, Ryan Reynolds has the idea to try and burn it to death with an improvised flamethrower (like Alien), but it's not super effective (like Alien), and Reynolds gets eaten from the inside out (like Alien).

The fire does trigger the suppression system, which creates little openings Calvin tries to get out through. There's a race to close the fire suppression vents before Calvin can slip out (which is really just the acid-melting-through-the-spaceship scene in Alien). Calvin manages to worm out through the final vent.

Conveniently for tension and plot, Calvin feeds on coolant, which ruins their ability to communicate with Earth. The commander of the mission makes a trip outside of the space station to try and repair it, but Calvin busts the coolant system in her suit, causing it to fill with fluid in zero gravity. She ends up drowning in outer space. It would suck to die that way, but if you're going to die, it might as well be totally unique!

As the surviving crew try to figure out what to do, NASA gets nervous and sends a ship to the space station to shove it into deep space, preventing Calvin from wreaking havoc on terra firma. This is probably a good idea. While it's never explicitly stated, my assumption is that Calvin's species somehow got on Mars, and consumed all of the organic matter, going dormant once they'd ruined the planet completely. 

NASA's quarantine plan isn't successful because Calvin does what he does, and ruins everything. The film flips back and forth between the conceit that Calvin is just an animal trying to survive, and that it has some level of higher intelligence to solve problems (just like...well, you know). The NASA plan ends up crippling the space station, sending it into a decaying orbit. Neither of the two surviving astronauts know if Calvin can survive reentry, but they don't want to risk it. The plan is to lure Calvin into one of the lifeboats, and fly the ship into deep space to save humanity, while the other astronaut travels back to Earth to tell their tale.

The dark twist at the end is that Calvin is on the ship that makes it back to Earth, while the other astronaut floats helplessly into deep space, knowing that Earth is likely doomed. Even though the twist becomes a little obvious as the editing gets more and more confusing between the two lifeboats flying around, I'm a fan any time a movie is ballsy enough to suggest humanity's extinction as the credits roll.

Summary:

Despite being a clone of Alien, Life is still worth checking out. It's a tight little space thriller, and there's always room for those. It could have done more with practical effects, but the CGI isn't too annoying. The space effects are cool, and the characters are likeable. It's a pretty solid movie, and I'm sorry I didn't see it in the theater when it came out.

It's free on demand if you have the premium channels, so if you're a fan of sci-fi horror, check it out.

Spooktober II Review #25 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Halloween III:
Season of the Witch (1982)
Tommy Lee Wallace

"It's getting late. I could use a drink."

Four years after the original John Carpenter masterpiece, Halloween III, a film so bizarrely funny and charmingly incompetent that it's become a classic in its own right, was released. There are so many weird choices that Tommy Lee Wallace made with both the direction and the script that it feels a bit like a weird piece of outsider art, except that it has all the technical touches of actual filmmaking. It's such a curious creation, and one that I love.

Imagine going to the theater in 1982 ready for some more Michael Meyers hacking and slashing, but instead getting a weird story about an Irish toy manufacturer who wants to murder every child in America with magic Halloween masks. From what I understand, John Carpenter (who only acted as producer for the Halloween films after #1) wanted to transform the series into different spooky stories outside of the Michael Meyers-verse. This was their first and only attempt at that terrible idea, because audiences were pissed, and it was not nearly as successful as the previous installments.

But that's ok. Who cares about box office results? That's no arbiter of quality. But you now what is? Tom Atkins, and this is his magnum opus.

Let's start with him, in fact. The directorial choice to make him into a greasy drunk is easily the best part of the film. I think Tommy Lee Wallace wanted him to be a rugged, hard-drinkin' man's man, but he just comes off as a complete degenerate. And it's awesome.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of his degenerate drunk behavior in this film:

1. Shows up at his ex-wife's house to deliver some cheap dollar store masks to his children, who instantly hate them. His wife comments that he smells like booze, and he doesn't deny he was at the bar before coming over.
2. He goes to work drunk. He is a medical doctor in an Emergency Department.
3. While at work he spanks a nurse on her ass and jokes that she should come take a nap with him.
4. He sleeps while on his shift. When he wakes up, he appears to have a searing hangover.
5. After a mysterious patient comes into the hospital raving mad and is murdered by another mysterious man in a suit, Dr. Tom Atkins tries to stop the murderer who immolates himself in the parking lot. Dr. Atkins just watches him burn with a blank look on his face.
6. The following day, the mysterious patient's adult daughter, Ellie, comes to visit Dr. Tom at a bar. He is the only one there, and the chairs are all up on the tables. It is clearly morning. He is drinking beer and doing shots of whiskey.
7. When Ellie arrives at the bar she says, "One of the nurses said I could find you here."
8. They decide to take a drive out to the Silver Shamrock Corporation to find out what Ellie's father was doing there right before he died. Ellie says that it's not far away. Dr. Tom Atkins brings a six pack of Miller High Life roadies for the trip.
9. After arriving in the small town where Silver Shamrock is located, they check into a motel, and Dr. Atkins coyly suggests they stay in the same room. They've known each other for about three hours.
10. When Ellie wants to get right down to work and find out what happened to her father, Tom Atkins says, "It's getting late. I could use a drink." He's already had a couple eye-openers and a sixer of High Life on the road.
11. "A drink" to Dr. Atkins means an entire bottle of whiskey, that he drinks from a paper bag while walking down the streets of this small town. He's not an unkind drunk, however. He shares his bottle with a local hobo. The hobo looks more put together than Tom Atkins.
12. That night, reeking of booze, Tom Atkins and Ellie take part in easily the grossest consensual sex scene in film history. It starts with him munching on her nipple, if that's any indication of how bad it is.
13. During the course of their.....lovemaking, they hear a woman scream from next door at the motel. Tom Atkins decides that it's nothing, despite there being a clear mystery to this town. They keep having sex, presumably for hours.

Here's an appropriately loving tribute:

But there's something undeniably charming about all of this, and it's what keeps me coming back year after year for more Halloween III. If he were just a regular middle-aged hero, it would be boring. The fact that he's a total degenerate alcoholic, and that his drinking isn't even a driving part of the plot is so funny and weird. It's the kind of bizarre plot choice that a foreign amateur filmmaker like Y.K. Kim or John Rad would make. But it doesn't come off as fake or like Wallace was trying to force it to be funny. It's totally natural and hilarious.

Let's get into the non-boozy parts of the story. As I mentioned above in the Atkins degeneracy rundown, a mysterious man shows up at a hospital, ranting and raving, holding a Halloween mask in his hand. He is brutally murdered while in the hospital by a silent man in a suit:

It turns out the murdered man owned a toy store nearby and sold a lot of the Halloween masks that he was holding. They're masks from a company called Silver Shamrock, and despite being generic and terrible, are evidently Furby raised to the power of Tickle Me Elmo, so every kid is foaming at the mouth to get one. Maybe it's the annoyingly catchy jingle:

In the Halloween III universe, there's only one conglomerate that somehow cornered the market on Halloween masks, has clearly spent millions on daily national television advertisements, and gets independent vendors to travel to the factory to fill their own orders. Tom Atkins and Ellie cross paths with two of these salespeople at their motel. One of the salespeople notices that the Silver Shamrock logo has fallen off one of the masks and has what looks like a microchip on the back of it. Curious, she pokes the microchip with a bobby pin, and a blue laser shoots out and fries her face off. Something is clearly amiss with these masks.

Tom and Ellie visit the Silver Shamrock factory and begin to discover the horrible truth. It turns out that a group of Irish druids practicing modern witchcraft have stolen a piece of Stonehenge and are using tiny chunks of it to make the masks into something dangerous once activated by a television signal (or a bobby pin, I guess?). 

Confused as to how this works, or how they even got a piece of Stonehenge to a small town in California? Everyone is, but there's no explanation given. In fact, as the main villain Conal Cochran is detailing his dastardly plan, all he says is that it was a "piece of work" to get part of Stonehenge there.

Somewhere in this mess, Ellie is kidnapped by the Silver Shamrock people. As Tom goes looking for her, he's trapped and Cochran gives him a demonstration of their power so that he can see what will happen when kids across the country wear their masks at 9 pm Halloween night:

Before it was just a laser that fried a woman's face off, but now it's a signal that turns children's heads into bugs and snakes. Cochran's explanation for this plan is that it's the best practical joke in history. 

No, seriously. That's the only explanation given.

One thing that the movie never adequately explains is how the plan will work across timezones. The signal is going to air at 9 pm Pacific Time, which means that in New York and Boston and Miami, kids will have to stay up until Midnight (on a Sunday, mind you) to be affected. In the control room, there are clocks from every timezone, so the evildoers are cognizant that time is relative across the country, but that doesn't seem to throw a wrench into the works.

Naturally, Tom Atkins breaks free, and begins disrupting the plans. He attacks a guard, and discovers that he's actually an elaborate automaton built by Cochran. He rescues Ellie, rigs the control room to display the all-important signal, and dumps a bunch of Silver Shamrock tokens onto the automatons working the computers. This causes a bunch of lasers to fire off and kill the robots and Cochran.

Tom and Ellie flee the factory, and speed toward town to try and stop the broadcast. It's already 8:50 pm, so time is getting short. As they are driving, Ellie reveals herself to be one of Cochran's automatons and attacks Tom, causing him to wreck the car. Has she always been a robot? Did they somehow turn her into a robot in the couple of hours they had her imprisoned? Is this all a hallucination that he's having from hours of being without a drink? Who knows!

Luckily Tom Atkins has been in his fair share of car accidents, so he's not phased when the car plows into a tree. He quickly dispatches Ellie by knocking her head off with a solid knuckle sandwich, and runs to a nearby gas station to try and stop the broadcast.

By the film's internal clock, he's got two minutes to spare, but somehow reaches, presumably, the television czar. With his DT's raging, Tom convinces the powers that be to remove the broadcast in the best final scene ever:

Evidently the original ending was a fade to black as the screams of millions of children can be heard, but Wallace considered that too dark.

Also, how great that there's only three channels? I guess the druids didn't want to pay for all of the small-market UHF signals too. That's probably why this 4,000 year-old group decided to pull off this plot in 1982. If they waited for cable to get big, they'd go bankrupt trying to run ads on every possible station.


Ok, so is Halloween III the best horror movie ever? No, but that's ok. It's unintentionally funny, it's schlocky, it's nonsensical, and Tom Atkins is at his most Tom Atkins here. It's super entertaining, and there are lots of understated but hilarious details. Basically, it's the fucking best.

There are some reviewers who consider it to be a hidden masterpiece of anti-consumerist filmmaking, but that's probably not true. It's just a weird B-movie with a ton of memorable scenes and an amazing lead actor with a raging alcohol problem. Everyone's trying hard, and it's a successful light-hearted R-rated horror classic. 

Summary:

Sure it's a little goofy, but this is a movie I'm going to watch every single year. It's undeniably charming, draws you in with the booze soaked charisma of the lead character, and keeps you entertained with the absurd plot. If you've never seen it, now's the time. Crack a few High Life's at 9 am and enjoy it in the way Tom Atkins intended.