Patrick Puppet's House of Horror

I really liked The Gallows. I’m sure found footage fans everywhere are scratching their heads and the genre purists are ready to crucify me. Put down your pitchforks and hear me out.

Before I explain myself any further, I also wanna say that the Gallows really isn’t that well made at all. It mostly feels like a cash grab about teenagers aimed at teenagers that somehow manages to pull the worst things from two more things also aimed at teenagers: High School Musical and Paranormal Activity.

How is it possible that I can like something that also isn’t well made? That’s a good question.

Something I absolutely love about the horror genre is its ability to appeal to both high culture and low culture. On one end of the spectrum we have a movie like The Witch, a subtle, smart folktale interested in asking some pretty big questions about God and the nature of evil. On the other end, however, we have movies like 1973s The Sinful Dwarf, a sexploitation horror movie less interested in big questions and more interested in, well, other stuff. (By other stuff, I mean sex. Lots and lots of sex.)

My point is, horror is unique in that it is for absolutely everyone under the sun.

This culture of inclusion, however, is feeling a little bit like it’s slowly drifting away.  More and more often I see horror movie reviews on blogs and social media that go about praising a movie by first bringing down every other movie in the genre. Most reviews for The Witch I saw started with something along the lines of “Horror movies today don’t get made like they used to” or “with the flood of [insert sub-genre here] horror movies are losing quality.”

This mode of compare-and-put-down criticism is something that is bleeding into the discussions in the horror community and beyond; discussions between fans and non-fans are often plagued with this invisible horror hierarchy.  People who enjoy art house movies like The Witch are somehow above, or “smarter” than people who enjoy other types of horror movies.

This hierarchy comes from, I believe, inadequate criterion with which these films are assessed: audience experience seems to be totally taken out of the equation.  

I love The Gallows because I had a great experience watching it. A theater full of screaming college kids at midnight is an excellent environment. It’s fun. It’s live. It’s interactive.

Until yesterday I had never seen a Shaw Bros. movie that was about actual brothers.  I also didn’t know that there were three Shaw brothers (Coen brothers got me thinking there were probably two), and I ALSO didn’t know that filmmaking in China was banned in 1987 in order to promote more production for television. Luckily, Eight Diagram Pole Fighter was made in 1983. In before the lock!

I love Martial Arts movies. They are awesome. But I am also the first person to admit that many, many Martial Arts movies from the 70s and 80s (not just the Shaw bros movies) can be pretty rough to sit through. (aka don’t try and watch Seven Steps of Kung-Fu on a date. Trust me.)

To make kind of a blanket statement, these movies are often pretty poorly made; if you are watching a DVD, the transfer is usually shit, if it’s a dub, the dubbing is usually shit, and if it even had a script, the story is usually shit. The fighting is always cool, though.  This doesn’t make them bad movies by any stretch of the imagination. I love them. But they are poorly made.

Most of the time it really doesn’t seem like the filmmakers gave a flying fuck if you liked the entire movie. The writing could be awful, but as long as the fights were cool you get the feeling that whoever made this movie is patting themselves on the back whispering “job well do ne” into their own ear…or something like that.

To keep it simple: most martial arts movies are like a big cake cut into eight slices (eight is an arbitrary number.)  The only catch with this cake, is that seven of the slices are actually filled with shit or poison or something. Only one of the slices is normal, delicious, well made cake. But you have to eat the whole thing. Because the well-made portion is usually at the end.

The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter is like eight pieces of really, really well made cake.

Like I said earlier, just because a lot of martial arts movies from the 70s and 80s are kind of shitty doesn’t mean that all of them are. I don’t have to give you specific examples for that to hold true. ANYWAY.

The rest of the genre aside, this movie is EIGHT PIECES OF CAKE good. Why is it good? I don’t want to spoil too much.  This movie is kind of unique in that a first viewing going in blind really is a treat.

One thing I can say without spoiling anything is that the action sequences are amazing. Not only are they pretty badass and beautifully choreographed, but they are super creative as well. Most of the battles in the movie are fought with poles. It’s awesome.

The plot is a pretty basic revenge tale: Seven Sons are betrayed in a battle. Only two sons, 5th son and 6th son survive. 6th son returns home and goes insane from the trauma. 5th son played by Gordon Liu (Pai Mei in Kill Bill) joins a monastery and trains to get his revenge. Pretty simple. But it’s delivered with clarity, which also feels like a genre rarity to me. This is probably a combination of good writing and good dubbing, though I’m willing to bet the latter did a lot more than I am giving it credit for.

This might have been more of a post about martial arts movies instead of a review. But that’s okay. When a movie is eight slices of cake good, you should just dive in and eat it.

Pin takes place at the intersection of incest, ventriloquism, and anatomically correct medical demonstration dummies. All of these things happen in the movie, in an order that might surprise you.

Quick Plot Summary: Two children live with their father and mother: dad is a good doctor with a knack for puppetry (more on that in a second) and mom is a dutiful housewife who just wants to make sure things stay clean.

Dr. Dad has a life size medical demonstration puppet named Pin.  He uses ventriloquism to speak through Pin to teach the kids about health and sex. This fails. This fails because the giant, looming axe of incestuous relations hangs over the heads of the two high school aged characters for the entire movie. The axe never drops (thank god) but it gets pretty damn close. A lot of times. It ends up feeling like a Pit and the Pendulum scenario: with every passing minute the incest gets closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, and closer and then the movie ends.

I think I’ve already typed too many words about the plot, so lets wrap this up (SPOILERS):

dr dad dies, mom dies, older brother keeps talking to pin, sister wants to have sex, older brother is jealous (yikes), sister has sex anyway, older brother dresses up pin to look exactly like himself (bowl cut included), sister gets boyfriend (uh-oh), boyfriend isn’t brother (double uh-oh), boyfriend dies, guess who kills him (brother) turns out (spoiler) pin doesn’t actually talk and it’s been in the brothers mind the whole time. (roll credits).

I was pretty surprised at how awesome this movie was.

I know it was a cheaply made film from the 80s, and I know some of the acting was shit, and I know the transfer I watched on YouTube was godawful, and I know the axe of incest was useless and uncomfortable (for a correct use of the incest axe, see Crimson Peak), but the movie actually had some pretty good stuff. It was light on the gore, which surprised me BUT the character Pin was awesome and truly unique.  

How often have you had a medical demonstration dummy act as sort of this weird, Lady Macbeth style manipulator/adviser for the main character?  Fucking never, thats when.

I’m a sucker for doll movies. I always have been. (It’s a long story.)

And Pin (much like this years The Boy) took a pretty creative step with the genre.

It sort of falls apart in the second half because theres just…too much batshit crazy stuff that happens.

It gets a little hard to follow.  It feels like the movie sort of loses track of who the monster is.

Is it Pin? Is it older brother? Is it incest itself?

The Hallow was marketed as Pan’s Labyrinth meets Straw Dogs. This made me half excited to see it: I hated Straw Dogs and Pan’s Labyrinth somehow gets less and less cool every time I watch it.  My favorite parts of Pan’s Labyrinth were all the parts that included those awesome creature effects. Luckily for me, the best parts of The Howling Included Pan’s Labyrinth style special effects.

In The Hallow, a tree scientist named Adam and his dedicated wife Claire move to an old house in the middle of some old woods in Ireland. They have a newborn baby. Adam likes to do science.  The villagers (and by extension, the mysterious forces in the woods) do not like that Adam does science. 

I’m sure you can guess which of the two parties deal with this in a respectful way. (Hint: It’s not the mysterious creatures.) It makes sense that both parties don’t like the science Adam does, because the science he does happens to be plotting to cut down substantial sections of the old forest. 

From here, The Hallow turns into a creative hybrid of a home invasion and haunted house type movie. The woodland creatures prey upon the home and simultaneously “haunt” and infect it with some pretty weird black Vegemite looking tar goo ghost stuff.

Let’s start with what I didn’t like, since it wasn’t much but pretty significant. 

The movie doesn’t really do much to develop the characters or their relationships. The scientist Adam ends up being kind of a douche. I wasn’t happy when weird, Cronenberg-esqe body transformations started happening to him but I also wasn’t, like, SAD.  The movie kinds of put me in a weird spot. He wasn’t enough of a dick to warrant celebration, but he wasn’t exactly a nice guy either. 

And I could understand the plight of the woodland creatures: their home was gonna be destroyed. I would defend myself too. 

Now on to what I did like: the creatures and the gore effects. 

This movie kind of feels like someone had a really killer design concept and a huge budget to blow on practical effects, and it just so happened they needed to add a story. 

This isn’t meant to insult the filmmakers, because they created some seriously kick ass monsters. 

They were like cabbage patch kids meets Pan’s Labyrith meets satan. 

I loved every minute of it.