Tales Of Halloween

Pumpkin Patch

Tales Of Halloween
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, 
Adam Gierasch, Andrew Kasch, Neil Marshall, 
Lucky McKee, Mike Mendez, Dave Parker, 
Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp and Paul Solet
USA 2015 
Arrow Films DVD Region 2

Well then... I finally got around to watching the elusive Tales For Halloween in time for this year’s Halloween posts. I say elusive because I bought this one a couple of years before the pandemic at FrightFest for a fiver but, every October when I try and watch it, it seems to have buried itself under a pile of movies and I never seem to be able to lay hands on it but, this year it managed to turn up when a pile of physical media overturned itself on top of me and so I put it to one side for the right time. 

And I have to say... for a portmanteau film, which are often hit and miss anyway, this one is pretty good. You have ten short movies by ten different directors (some of them very famous genre directors like Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall) and they all seem to take place on the same night, although in different towns.* You can tell it’s the same night because, on many of them, George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is playing on TV (although, in one of the clips, it seems to be Carnival Of Souls). 

And, contrary to what you would expect form a string of shorts put together, even the ones that are maybe not quite as good as the others are still quite watchable and immensely entertaining. So ten, not bad, movies. And to boot you have a radio DJ linking some (but not all, she’s definitely underused in this movie) of the segments played by none other than Adrienne Barbeau, delivering her full on, smoky radio voice, as she did when she played radio DJ Stevie Wayne in John Carpenter’s The Fog (reviewed here). So more or less an homage but, presumably not named as such due to copyright reasons, I would guess. 

Standouts for me would be Neil Marshall’s segment Bad Seed, where a carved pumpkin comes to life and starts eating people, because it’s really silly and, considering I don’t like slasher movies so much (unless they’re Italian), the Friday 31st segment directed by Mike Mendez, which features a cute, stop motion looking alien (it’s probably really CGI) looking for a trick or treat. 

Also, another nice thing is the use of various famous directors amongst the actors in the odd cameo. So along with people like Barbara Crampton and Lin Shaye you have the likes of Stuart Gordon, Mick Garris and John Landis coming along for the ride. Which is nice and perhaps shows what a close knit community the horror community is (the great Dr. Rebekah McKendry is also in this). 

Added to this, among a whole list of composers scoring the shorts, we have title music done by the great Lalo Schifrin. Now, as far as I’m concerned it’s not one of his best but I did notice that one of the directors is also a Schifrin so, I have to wonder if the title music was pulled in as a favour to someone. But I also loved a musical moment in the segment The Weak And The Wicked where a pocket watch brings us to a flashback of a memory in the same style as a Sergio Leone western... and the music suddenly gets all Morricone in tone. So, yeah, some nice things to be found in this selection, to be sure. 

And that’s me finally done with Tales From Halloween. A short review perhaps but a definite recommendation from me if you want something fun and frivolous to watch during this years ‘Halloween festivities’. I believe some people are still doing this stuff and certainly my local Tesco, with it’s gazillions of novelty horror items put out for the kids in October, seems to indicate that it’s still a thing. 

*Nope. Tag line on the poster says “One Night. One Town. Ten Chilling Stories.” so, I guess that didn’t quite come across to me because, well, all the stories should be overlapping with each other then, right?

Deathcember

Christmas
Advent-ures

Deathcember
Germany 2019
Directed by Various Artists
Shout! Factory

Warning: Yeah, some spoilerage.

A fairly quick shout out for a 2019 Christmas movie called Deathcember. It’s basically a bit like The ABCs Of Death movies in that it’s a collection of short films based around Christmas death (and sometimes horror) by a variety of international directors, some of them quite famous such as Ruggero Deodato, Andreas Marschall, Lucky McKee and Pollyanna McIntosh. The film is advertised as being 24 films but there are actually 26 short movies in this one, as there are also two additional movies mid and post end credits.

The film starts off with the camera swooping over a computer generated snowscape which finds a cemetery with borders that are shaped like the Star of David. The camera wanders around from various gravestones on which credits for the movie are found before moving up and out of the cemetery to take in the film’s title and then going into a cabin. Inside the cabin, which includes an upside down Christmas Tree (the anti-Christmas?) the camera starts moving around a room and then it will stop on an object. The outline of an advent calendar door will then appear around that section of the screen before opening and allowing the camera to swoop inside the door to access each segment.

As you would expect from this kind of portmanteau movie, it’s a hit and miss affair but, I’d have to say on this one that most of the segments are at least interesting and it’s never a dull affair. I’d say more hit than miss but, at the same time, don’t expect too many of them to really knock your socks off. There are some nice ideas though, such as a greedy, advent calendar chocolate binging child finding himself suddenly turned to chocolate and inside an advent calendar himself, as his sister then eats him. There were some definite highlights for me too...

All Sales Fatal by Michael Varrati was a nice one of an unsatisfied customer trying to return her Christmas purchase because she’s changed her mind but the store won’t refund her without a receipt. Anger wells up and she and the sales guy get suddenly involved in a brutal fight to the death before the, admittedly obvious, punchline moment of that particular story. X-Mas On Fire by Florian Frerichs is not such a great idea but it is quite entertaining, depicting a heist gone wrong. It also has a nice few moments of Reservoir Dogs parody in it. Bob Pipe’s door, The Hunchback of Burg Hayn is a black and white silent movie and nicely captures the style, albeit with a big dollop of humour, of a 1920s Hollywood production. Andreas Marschall’s door Pig is probably going to be big with the strange modern brand of feminists. When a man is marked up with a big P on his jacket, mimicking Fritz Lang’s movie M, a brutal retribution is visited on a guy by a group of vengeful women. However, when he is unmasked and one of them exclaims to the others that it’s the wrong guy... the brutality continues under the guise of “There are no wrong ones.”

There were some wrong ones for me though and, one of the segments, a spectacular looking science fiction piece called 3rd December 2389AD, mainly failed for me because I just didn’t understand what the heck was going on in it at all. But that’s probably more to do with me than the quality of the actual film. Probably my three favourites in this collection were Crappy Christmas (terrible title) by Juergen Kling, December The 19th by Milan Todorovic and Five Deaths In Blood Red by Ama Lea.

Crappy Christmas is an animated short in the style of a claymation movie. It includes what is certainly the most inventive death of the film (and of most movies, I suspect) which I will only describe as the ‘viagra catapult cock through the head’ death, involving a Bishop... and I’ll leave that there but, yeah, you need to see it. December The Nineteenth is a short tale about two girls about to embark on a lesbian relationship, who have their first date, as it were, by going ice skating together at night. However, the first time skater is so bad at it that she ends up causing the other to first break one finger before she accidentally slices off the fingers of her other hand with her skates, eventually ending up with her ice skate accidentally embedded in the other girl’s face before meeting her own accidental death. It’s stylish and funny. Five Deaths In Blood Red is exactly as it sounds, a mini giallo parody and it really captures the style of the early to mid-1970s gialli by the likes of Sergio Martino in its too short running time. There is some nice music in this segment too by Eduardo Daniel Victoria, which hovers between slightly out of kilter, 1970s US slasher mode but also some lovely giallo homages in its make-up which really help push the comparison.

And that’s me pretty much done on Deathcember. I think  the notes I took while watching this one were longer than the review this time but looking at them, there’s not much else I’d want to elabourate on, I think. The movie is exactly what you’d expect from these kind of ‘film collective’ movies and it doesn’t scrimp on the violence/goriness and even adds some very occasional nudity. It’s not fantastic but it’s certainly entertaining enough to ensure that the nearly two and a half hour running time breezes by and it continues to hold the interest. Definitely not a bad film to watch if you want something both violent and funny to check out over the Christmas period.

The Woman

Deadlier Than The Male

The Woman

US 2011

Directed by Lucky McKee

Revolver Entertainment Region 2

Warning: This’ll probably have some slight spoilers in it, I imagine.

Okay... so Lucky McKee’s movie The Woman is one of those films which comes along every now and again and, frankly, no matter how good or bad these movies are... the public reaction to these ones often just leaves me bemused.

Before I go into what I thought of this movie, I should probably warn you that 1) I haven’t seen a lot of Mr. McKee’s work, which is something I’ll try to remedy because, 2) the two things I have seen him do, The Masters Of Horror episode Sick Girl and the movie May (both with the excellent Angela Bettis who plays the mother in this movie) have each been excellent pieces of work, well worth watching.

The other thing you need to know about me before you read this review is that I wasn’t even aware that it is a kind of sequel to another movie also written by Jack Ketchum (who co-wrote the screenplay to this with McKee) called Offspring. Apparently, that movie explains where The Woman, who is the subject of this movie, came from.

So I’ll have to start off my review to this a little differently now that I know (and I wasn’t aware of this at the time I was watching) that The Woman is not a wild woman brought up by wolves or some such... but the last survivor of a clan of cannibals who were the subject of Offspring (a movie which I now have to try and get ahold of... I hate finding out a movie I watch is actually a “hidden” sequel to another... would rather watch these things in the right order).

Anyway, this fierce survivor who hunts and kills in a forest is “captured” by the misogynistic, bullying and generally obnoxious husband and father of a son and two daughters... and put in an underground room to train up to be civilised... which is a thinly veiled excuse for the husband wanting to have his wicked way with the feral young lady (which he does).

The film is not so much a movie about the title character, in all honesty, but about the general limits the various female members of this guy’s family can be pushed to before they finally lose their ability to cope with such inhuman behaviour (which, to be fair, they’ve tragically self-enabled by not standing up for themselves in the past... although this doesn’t, of course, excuse such behaviour to begin with) and take a stand. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove at the end of the film and Angela Bettis’ character of the mother is in the process of doing this, her past actions... or actually it would be more appropriate to say her past inactions... make her as much of a potential threat/victim to the eyes of the one person who can do anything about all this as her husband and son are. Since I was really rooting for this character, then, I must admit to being a tad disappointed that she wasn’t better treated by the title character.. although, it’s also true, that one can see why not and it certainly was nothing less than I was expecting.

Now then, as I said, the public reaction of shock and outrage that seemed to be “all the rage” when this film was playing the festival circuits last year is something which I do find surprising, if not downright perplexing, to say the least. I was expecting the film to be something a lot more stronger than it actually was and, while I’m sure the writers and writer/director are very satisfied with the knee jerk response it’s caused... I don’t really think it’s warranted in this case. The goriness of the film, for example, is really not all that shocking and certainly not a million miles away from something you might catch in an Indiana Jones film (people who have seen both this movie and Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom will know exactly what I’m referring to here) and at its best it’s more impressionistic and poetic via the editing than you would see in lesser films in this genre... although I’m not entirely sure what genre of movie this is, to be honest with you. I wouldn’t call it a horror movie (which is what I was expecting from this director due to the small amount of his stuff I’ve seen before)... maybe an addendum to the cannibal craze of the 70s and 80s perhaps?

One thing’s for sure though... it’s a very well put together little movie which has some astonishingly, cleanly framed and achingly beautiful photography which, coupled with some excellent performances from pretty much all the cast, make for a very watchable and perhaps even compelling movie, well worth giving up some of your time for.

And as for that general outcry... there’s some amazing footage of an actor who got so riled up by watching this that he seriously and deliberately disrupted a screening at Sundance Film Festival (you can’t pay for publicity like that)... I’m thinking now that perhaps the general outcry was due more to the fact of the uncompromising attitude of the male characters in the film (especially the husband) as it’s maybe been a while since we’ve seen such an unsympathetic portrayal of this kind of “know your place” attitude on screen. What people have got to realise, I guess, is that this is just, you know, a fiction... you’re allowed to explore these grizzly edges in art. If you start to turn away from horrible people like this guy in the arts, where this has no real consequence to the many female victims of domestic violence throughout the world, and get reminded how terrible it is... then how long before that kind of unacceptable behaviour becomes even more rampant in real life? People do need to be on their guard and watch for these crimes against basic humanity in the real world out there. So it’s not really acceptable to react in shock to this movie... which is actually a big movie about female empowerment (and therefore should be promoted and cherished more)... when hidden crimes like this are being committed in “real life land” every day. And if you do find the subject matter unpalatable... just remind yourself that these are just actors and it’s only a movie, for goodness sake.

When all is said and done, The Woman is a wonderful parable about suffering women overcoming the constraints of their mental prisons (yeah, I’m not talking about the title character here now, obviously) and finding a way of overcoming their antagonists, in this case by freeing the blunt instrument of The Woman to mete out the violent and vengeful justice they are not strong enough to deliver themselves... it’s a film with a very uncompromising moral centre, and I don’t really see how that deserved all of the negative press it seemed to get on its short release.

Personally, this movie isn’t completely my cup of tea, but I do recognise a brilliant artist in the director (it’s a really well shot and gorgeous looking movie folks) and any film that is this good on a technical level and which has characters you can care for and which delivers such a strong message of “girl power” is more than alright in my book. Definitely a recommendation if this kind of movie is of a genre (or sub genre) that you particularly like to see. Give it a go and definitely check out the director’s Sick Girl and May if you get the chance.

Oh. One last thing before I go... stay past the end credits to this movie if you want to see something creative, baffling and surreal.