#quality horror

WARNING!  POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T SEEN IT ...

10.  THE MIST

In 2007, writer/director Frank Darabont once again proved he does his best work when adapting master of literary horror Stephen King (after The Green Mile and solid gold masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption), this time turning to pure horror with one of the author’s lesser-known early novellas.  The result is another tour-de-force cinematic blueprint, a taut, harrowing tale of humanity pushed far beyond the brink by unexplained supernatural events and the monstrous lengths normal people will go to to stay alive, as a small-town New England supermarket is cut off from the outside world by a mysterious, monster-filled mist.  The Expanse’s Thomas Jane proves a complex hero, beefy yet vulnerable as local artist David Drayton, leading a high-calibre cast of Stephen King-movie/TV regulars – Jeffrey DeMunn (The Green Mile), Andre Braugher (Salem’s Lot), William Sadler (The Shawshank Redemption) and Frances Sternhagen (Misery) – and “newcomers” – Laurie Holden (who must have really impressed Darabont, since he subsequently cast her alongside DeMunn in The Walking Dead), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s Toby Jones (as one of the most unorthodox action heroes in cinematic history) and Miller’s Crossing’s Marcia Gay Harden, pretty much stealing the film as deeply unhinged Bible-basher Mrs Carmody, who goes from unsavoury town nut to fervent cult leader as the situation grows increasingly desperate.  Darabont once again proves what an exceptional screen storyteller he can be, effortlessly weaving an atmosphere of mounting dread and knife-edge tension, as well as delivering some nightmarish set-pieces featuring magnificent Lovecraft-inspired beasties designed by The Walking Dead’s creature effects master Greg Nicotero.  When cinematic horror was becoming increasingly saturated with “gorno” Saw-derivatives, this was a welcome return to old-fashioned monster movie thrills (Darabont himself was heavily inspired by the monochrome scary movies of his childhood, and longed to make the film in black-and-white – indeed, this is definitely worth watching at least once in the “director’s cut” B&W version he included on the special edition DVD release), and not only proved one of the best examples of King on screen to date, but also one of THE key horror movies of the “Noughties”. Not least thanks to that ending, one of the greatest sucker punch twists of all time – reputedly King was most envious of Darabont on seeing it for the first time, wishing he’d thought it up himself. Coming from the King of Horror, that’s high praise indeed.

9.  30 DAYS OF NIGHT

When Steve Niles, the undisputable master of post-modern horror comics, originally came up with the concept for his definitive work, it was intended for the big screen, but he ultimately wound up committing it to print because he just couldn’t get anyone to produce it.  Interesting, then, that the comic’s runaway success led to its optioning by Sam Raimi and his production company Ghost House Pictures, Niles adapting the first volume alongside Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson, with Hard Candy director David Slade at the helm. Of course, the concept was always a killer – for one month every year, the sun never rises over the Alaskan town of Barrow, a fact that a coven of hungry vampires have decided to exploit in a midwinter free-for-all feeding frenzy.  Josh Hartnett manfully crumbles in what remains his best role as town sheriff Eben Olemaun, ably supported by Melissa George as his estranged fire-marshal wife Stella, Memento/Batman Begins’ Mark Boone Junior as hard-as-nails town loner Bo, Ben Foster (one of my very favourite actors) as a mysterious drifter with a dark agenda, and Danny Huston, who created one of the best ever screen vampires with nihilistic pack leader Marlow. It’s ironic that David Slade should have followed this with Twilight film Eclipse (although he was an inspired choice – after all, it’s the one that DOESN’T suck) – this is about as far removed from the toothless, blood-lite young adult series as you can get, an unrelenting, gore-drenched exercise in relentless carnage and ice-cold terror.  These vamps wouldn’t be caught (ahem) dead sparkling – they’re man-shaped mako sharks, all dead black eyes and jagged teeth, gleefully revelling in slaughter and playing sadistic games of cat and mouse with the isolated townsfolk.  This is definitely not a movie for the faint of heart, and it takes itself deadly seriously right through the unapologetically bleak ending, but it is nonetheless an endlessly rewarding thrill ride for the faithful, paying respect to all the great conventions of the genre while simultaneously ripping them to shreds.  Brutal, bloody and brilliant, this is BAR NONE the best vampire movie of the post-Interview age, and very nearly my all-time favourite EVER ...

8. POLTERGEIST

1982 saw the release of TWO of my all-time fave horror movies, and the lesser (but no less awesome) of the two is what I personally consider to be THE DEFINITIVE haunted house movie.  Tobe Hooper, director of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, pretty much reinvented ghosts on the big screen with this thrilling tale of a small-town-American family, the Freelings, whose seemingly perfect home comes under the influence of a powerful supernatural force.  At first the effects are harmless – moving furniture and the like – until a night-time thunderstorm signals a terrifying escalation and younger daughter Carol-Anne (Heather O’Rourke) is sucked through a portal into the spirit world.  Long before he was the dad in The Incredibles, Craig T. Nelson had already become a pretty definitive cuddly American screen father as Steven Freeling, while JoBeth Williams is a lioness defending her cubs as mother Diane; then-newcomer Heather O’Rourke, meanwhile, is a naturalistic revelation as Carol-Anne, her innocent delivery of “They’re here!” becoming a genuine geek phenomenon all on its own, but the film’s real runaway performance comes from Zelda Rubinstein as diminutive Southern belle psychic medium Tangina Barrons, whose every screen moment is a quirky joy.  As you’d expect, Hooper’s scares are flawlessly executed, the atmospheric tension ratcheted with consummate skill, even if the director’s characteristic gore is kept to a PG-13-friendly minimum ... then again, this was a summer offering from Back to the Future producers Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg himself, who was also the main screenwriter. Indeed, his influence is keenly felt throughout – the suburban world the Freelings inhabit is very much in keeping with Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. – and there have been consistent rumours that he was all but the de-facto director on set.  The film (along with its sequels) has also gained a reputation for being cursed, with no less than FOUR cast members dying not long after (most notably Dominique Dunne, who played elder Freeling daughter Dana, who was murdered by her boyfriend just five months after the film’s release).  Whatever the truth behind these rumours, there’s no denying this is a cracking film – taut, atmospheric and consistently terrifying while also displaying a playful, quirky sense of humour and lots of heart, it remains one of the most rewarding and entertaining screen ghost stories around.

7.  BUBBA HO-TEP

Bruce Campbell is Elvis Presley!  He really is!  Although maybe he isn’t ... all right, TECHNICALLY he’s Sebastian Haff, a washed-up, long-retired Elvis impersonator languishing in a retirement home who claims he really IS the King (apparently he swapped places with the REAL Haff because he’d grown tired of fame).  Meanwhile one of his fellow residents is an old black man who claims he’s the real JFK, maintaining that President Lyndon Johnson had him dyed black and secreted in anonymity with a bag of sand sewn into the gap in his brain ... confused yet? Well hold on, cuz there’s more – the retirement home in question has been invaded by the malevolent spirit of a cursed soul-sucking mummy, and only these two fallen heroes can save the day ... yup, writer/director Don (Phantasm and John Dies At the End) Coscarelli’s initially criminally overlooked but deservedly seriously cult adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s novel is as typically oddball as the rest of his filmography.  It’s also his most moving and spiritual work to date – behind all the supernatural weirdness and quirky, offbeat humour this is a deeply-affecting meditation on the pains of growing old and losing your place in the world.  Bruce Campbell’s Elvis/Haff is a tragic hero, regretting his current lot and pining for former glories, but he still has the odd little twinkle of his former charm and bravado (particularly during his interactions with his nurse, played with spiky gutsiness by Ella Joyce), while screen legend Ossie Davis is stately and charismatic as “the former President Kennedy”, even when he sounds REALLY crazy.  Meanwhile the creature, “Bubba Ho-Tep” himself (Bob Ivy), is a fantastically weird creation, Coscarelli’s skilful use of atmospherics elevating him far above the “guy-in-a-suit” effects – he’s mean, cranky, and just as strong a character as his flesh-and-blood counterparts.  Coscarelli really let rip on this one – it’s chock-full of his characteristic leftfield comic-scariness (Elvis/Haff’s early encounter with one of the mummy’s scarab familiars is a particular zany gem), visually inventive and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, but in the end plays out on such a heartfelt, genuinely powerful and moving denouement that you can’t help getting a lump in your throat, even while it is one of those movies that leaves you with a big dumb goofy grin on your face.  It’d be pretty sweet if Coscarelli and his mate Paul Giamatti ever get their long-gestating “prequel” Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires off the ground, but this is one that you can’t help loving all on its own.  See this if you’re a Coscarelli fan – it’s his best work to date – see this if you love quirky, unusual and original horror ... hell, see this if you love MOVIES. This is a true GEM, not to be missed.

6.  DOG SOLDIERS

My favourite werewolf movie is also easily one of the most offbeat – think The Howling meets Assault On Precinct 13 and you’re pretty close to the mark.  Before visionary British horror director Neil Marshall had his big break with masterpiece The Descent, he made an impressive cult splash with his feature debut, a fiendish comedy horror in which a six-man British Army unit on training manoeuvres in the wilds of Scotland stumbles upon a pack of hungry werewolves and are forced to take shelter in an isolated cottage.  With their ammo dwindling and their weapons largely ineffective against the monsters (not a silver bullet between them, of course), it doesn’t look likely that ANY of will survive the night ... setting the humour dial for JET BLACK, Marshall keeps the atmosphere tense and the substantial gore flying (I was amazed when I saw this in the cinema that it was only a 15 – even just ten years earlier stuff like this was GUARANTEED a solid 18 certificate), while the squaddies are a likeably foul-mouthed bunch with a winning, sometimes enjoyably geeky line in spiky banter (Marshall makes frequent references to everything from Star Trek and The Evil Dead to The Matrix and, in one of my favourite nods, Zulu).  Trainspotting’s Kevin McKidd is brawny but enjoyably self-deprecating as nominal hero Cooper, Sean (son of Doctor Who Jon) Pertwee gives great earthy-shoutiness as Sgt. Wells, Darren Morfitt consistently steals the film as mouthy little bugger “Spoon” (short for Witherspoon), and Game Of Thrones star Liam Cunningham injects a strong dose of dark and dangerous as Captain Ryan, the special forces operative with a sinister plan, while Emma Cleasby is far from just a token female as zoologist Megan, who came to Scotland in search of the legend and seems to have found a whole lot more than she bargained for – she’s smart, tough and flat-out refuses to be a love interest, and definitely proved a good trial run for Marshall’s all-female cast in The Descent.  It’s impressively paced – after an initial character-driven set-up so we can get to know the lads (including a fun little scare-on-top-of-a-laugh moment), the action kicks in fast and rarely lets up for the rest of the film’s tightly-packed 105 minute running time.  The set pieces are thrilling and frequently fun (particularly Spoon’s ballsy little distraction technique), and the werewolves are impressively brought to life through physical animatronics created by Image FX (the Hellraiser effects team!) and a talented troupe of stilt-walking stunt performers – no cheesy CGI here!  Altogether it marked a blinding debut for a singular, visionary sci-fi/horror talent who’s still making his presence felt – Doomsday was a delightfully old-school slice of super violent sci-fi in the John Carpenter vein, while tight, gruesome little Roman-era suspense thriller Centurion proved that a historical epic doesn’t have to be 2+ hours long with a big budget to impress, and Marshall continues to garner real acclaim through his extensive TV work on the likes of Game of Thrones. That said, I can’t wait for him to return to the big screen, preferably with more dark, edgy, blood-soaked fun like this ...

5. TREMORS

I’ve always had something of a bias towards horror movies that are also comedies, or at least that have a strong sense of humour throughout, and when it comes to funny horror movies, this brilliant throwback to cheesy 1950s monster movies is KING, baby!  While it snuck in under the radar on its 1990 release, director Ron Underwood’s sleeper universally wowed critics, word of mouth helping it to become an impressive cult smash once it hit home video ... which meant I saw it at JUST the right time, the film quickly becoming a firm fixture in my favourites lists and a major milestone in my own geek development.  The premise is simplicity itself – giant underground worms with tentacles in their mouths terrorise an isolated desert community – but underneath the goofy concept is a surprisingly sophisticated movie that continues to influence filmmakers today.  Kevin Bacon was in a bit of a career slump at the time (Footloose had been SO LONG before), but this gave him both the shot in the arm he needed and one of his most memorable roles ever – odd-jobbing slacker Val McKee, who has to get off his arse and think big to beat the beasties; Fred Ward is the perfect foil as Val’s crotchety “business” partner Earl Basset, while Finn Carter is thoroughly lovable as scientist Rhonda LeBeck, a no-nonsense smart girl who can go toe-to-toe with the boys (and manages to lose her pants WITHOUT losing her credibility), but the film is consistently stolen by Family Ties star Michael Gross as tightly wound survivalist Burt Gummer – this might be Bacon’s movie, but Gross is the real star, deservedly becoming the driving force of the film’s various sequels AND the spinoff TV series.  The film opens with a killer of a funny line, starting as it means to go on – frequently hilarious and smart as a whip, consistently defying character and genre tropes and wrong-footing the viewer almost a decade before Joss Whedon started doing the same with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all the while balancing the belly laughs with some genuinely scary set pieces.  The worms themselves (or “Graboids”, if you want to get specific) are spectacular creations, some of the most original movie monsters out there, and they still stand up well today, just like the rest of the film.  A cornerstone of the genre that wins over new fans with each generation, this is one of those films that deserves to be remembered for a very long time, and looks set to do just that. 

4.  EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN

Nobody does screen chaos like Sam Raimi, particularly when it comes to his horror offerings – still his first and purest love. His original debut feature The Evil Dead is rightly considered the DEFINITIVE indie horror, and to this day remains the standard blueprint for all young, aspiring directors starting out in the genre ... it’s also a work of pure, unadulterated MADNESS once it gets going.  Raimi upped the ante with this part-remake, part-sequel, the increased budget and proper studio resources meaning he could REALLY let his imagination run riot, and the results are a cavalcade of tongue-clean-THROUGH-cheek, jet black comedic insanity that STILL has yet to be equalled.  Bruce Campbell returns as unlikely “hero” Ash Williams, thoroughly out of his depth and failing miserably to hold it together as the ancient tome of evil itself, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (“Book of the Dead”), unleashes a horde of undead demons on the isolated forest cabin he’s brought his girlfriend to.  Wildly expanding on the supernatural back-story of his original, Raimi and co-writer Scott Spiegel also ramped up the humour, playing the horror on the blackest edge they can, albeit cut with a hefty dose of Tex Avery – Ash’s battle with his own possessed, eventually severed hand is like some demented skit out of The Three Stooges, while the absolute comedic highlight is the ridiculously over-the-top “laughing room” sequence, in which the seemingly inanimate objects in the cabin suddenly come to life and begin to taunt Ash; add in the great wealth of re-view-friendly visual in-jokes scattered throughout and this remains Raimi’s FUNNIEST film to date. Campbell clearly had a ball, throwing himself into the action with everything he had, and he’s ably supported by a meaty (ahem) cast that includes a very pre-Slither Dan Hicks as a seriously scuzzy redneck and Raimi’s own brother Ted, virtually unrecognisable as one of the maniacal Deadites (“I’ll swallow your soul!”).  The creature effects from the great Greg Nicotero still stand up spectacularly well today (they remain some of his very best work), from hideous gurning beasts to insane fountains of blood, while Raimi’s direction is pitch-perfect, playing the humour beautifully while still (sometimes simultaneously) building up a near-unbearable atmosphere of unholy dread, and the climax is ingenious, beautifully setting things up for the enjoyably madcap trilogy-closer Army of Darkness: the Medievil Dead.  Raimi has finally brought the trilogy the follow-up fans had been waiting decades for with the fantastically bonkers Ash Vs. the Evil Dead series, but this delirious masterpiece remains the franchise’s zenith.  Groovy ...

3.  JAWS

It may be the oldest film on this list (released in 1975, it’s THREE YEARS OLDER than I am!), but Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough feature has aged incredibly well.  Indeed, it almost single-handedly changed the face of big budget cinema, establishing the idea of tent-pole summer blockbusters and blanket-bombardment advertising campaigns (in particularly it was one of the first to make heavy use of television to drum up excitement and interest), ultimately taking over $400,000,000 on its original release (the equivalent of multi-billion big earners like Avatar today) and paving the way for Star Wars two years later.  Not to mention the film’s famous negative effect on beach-going for years after ... but under all that there’s a magnificent, masterfully-crafted film, still (rightly) considered one of the director’s best.  The plot may be ridiculously simple – New England beach-community Amity Island is terrorised by a man-eating Great White shark – but there’s a stealthily subversive story here, taking old genre conventions and twisting them in new, unexpected directions (which would, ironically, form a template for a great many later horror movies); while the first hour is a slow-burn thriller, the second is more like a light-hearted nautical action adventure with added scares. The French Connection’s Roy Scheider virtually CREATED the everyman-out-of-his-depth hero with his portrayal of Amity police chief Martin Brody, a former New York cop who’s terrified of the water, Richard Dreyfuss is lovable comedic gold as rich kid marine biologist Matt Hooper, Lorraine Gary did a lot with very little as Brody’s wife Ellen, and Robert Shaw effortlessly steals the film as shark hunter Quint, a ferocious, scenery-chewing force of nature in the mould of Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab.  The film is immensely rich in great character moments, from Hooper’s rib-tickling arrival on the island and the dialogue-free moment Brody shares with his younger son Sean, to the undeniable high point of the film, where a humorous comparison of scars (which has itself become a popular homage-magnet in film and TV) leads to Quint chilling account of his wartime experience onboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis (the ship transporting the Hiroshima atomic bomb which was torpedoed in the Pacific, leading to over a thousand stranded sailors being eaten alive by sharks); indeed, this is one of Spielberg’s most well-written films, sitcom writer Carl (The Odd Couple) Gottlieb’s polish of author Peter Benchley’s adaptation of his own original novel still zipping and zinging today, although some of the best dialogue was derived from the actors’ own on-set improvisations (most famously Scheider’s now-legendary “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”).  It’s also one of his most well-directed, with near-hypnotic tricks in editing and bold, adventurous choices in atmosphere-building, often a result of the shoot’s infamous difficulties – the animatronic shark (affectionately named “Bruce” by the director, and “the Great White Turd” by the crew) created by Bob Mattley (the guy who did the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) was impressive when it worked, but this was so rarely that the director had to devise several means of creating maximum tension WITHOUT showing the shark, which ultimately ADDS to the effectiveness of those scenes, particularly the “barrel-chasing” in the second half.  None of these tricks, however, work better than the score from Spielberg’s most faithful collaborator, John Williams, based around a deceptively simple four-note melody that evolves into something spectacularly evocative, which has rightly become the film’s most iconic element.  Humorous, intriguing, intense and still thoroughly terrifying when it wants to be, this is, bar-none, the finest man-versus-nature horror EVER MADE, and surely always will be.

2.  NEAR DARK

I’m a fool for vampires (much like I’m a fool for redheads, but that’s a whole other conversation), so bloodsucker horror is one of my very favourite sub-genres.  I’m also a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow – two of her most recent features, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, both pinged VERY LOUDLY on my radar (the former is my favourite war movie of the current decade), while her collaboration with then husband James Cameron, Strange Days (he wrote, she directed), rates high on my list of criminally underrated screen gems.  So what do you think happened when she made a vampire movie?  The results SHOULD have become one of the most celebrated and legendary features in the genre ... except that it came out in October 1987, two months after the admittedly cool and fun but far more glossy and dumb The Lost Boys.  Needless to say in the wake of that, Bigelow’s film got kind of lost in the back chatter, nearly flopping at the box office and all but vanishing into obscurity ... until its subsequent release on video (quite rightly) earned it an impressive cult following.  Myself included, because this movie is RIGHT UP my dark and dangerous alley.  Collaborating with The Hitcher’s screenwriter Eric Red, Bigelow crafted a (largely) deadly serious modern day supernatural “western”, in which cocky farm-boy Caleb Colton (Heroes’ Adrian Pasdar) hits on cute drifter Mae (Jenny Wright, probably best known for her supporting turn in Young Guns 2), only to get WAY more than he bargained for when her kiss leaves him with a crippling hunger and one serious tanning problem.  Pasdar’s all-knowing youthful swagger disintegrates as he tumbles further down the vampiric rabbit hole, while Wright’s fragile beauty compliments her character’s deep, soulful melancholy – the pair make for a compelling, tragic romantic centre anchoring the horrors that unfold as Caleb begins to lose himself to his burgeoning nature; even so, the true dark and twisted soul of the film lies with Mae’s predatory nomad “family” – Lance Henriksen is the definitive “dark father” as nihilistic pack leader Jesse Hooker, while his Aliens co-star Jenette Goldstein is his perfect mate as punk rock femme fatale Diamondback, and Joshua John Miller excels as Homer, the bitter old man trapped in a child’s body ... meanwhile Bill Paxton consistently steals the film as mad dog Severen, chewing the scenery to splinters with gleeful, feral aplomb and stealing all the best lines.  It’s a potent, heady ride, taking itself pretty seriously throughout but deriving a subtle, inky black sense of gallows humour from the situation, and the set-pieces are intense and thrilling (particularly the shootout in a roadside motel at dawn, where shafts of sunlight become as lethal as bullets).  At times it’s also powerful, soulful and bleakly beautiful, Bigelow’s heavily stylised visuals brilliantly augmented by the spiky electronic score from Tangerine Dream. It also subverts the classic vampire conventions with great skill and originality, with nary a cross, coffin or even fang in sight.  Like 30 Days of Night, this is the perfect antidote for anyone suffering from Twilight-overload – the monster can be quite interesting when he’s the hero, but he’s just so much more fun when he’s the bad guy ...

1.  JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING

While I’m sure many will think I’m mad for preferring this over Carpenter’s other seminal horror classic Halloween, this one’s much more my speed, a perfect exercise in sustained tension, paranoia and white-knuckle terror. Critically mauled and under-performing on its release (it was labelled by many as a sort of “anti-E.T.: the Extraterrestrial”, which came out two weeks earlier ... and interestingly this opened the same day as Blade Runner!), it nonetheless became a massive cult hit now rightly considered one of the true DEFINITIVE horror movies.  Faithfully adapting John Campbell, Jr.’s novella Who Goes There? (certainly more so than Howard Hawks’ admittedly entertaining but ultimately very kitsch The Thing From Another World), it revolves around the all-male crew of U.S. research station 4, Outpost 31, in Antarctica, who come under threat from a body-snatching alien entity that can perfectly imitate its victims after investigating the mysterious destruction of a neighbouring Norwegian facility.  Carpenter regular Kurt Russell (Escape From New York, Big Trouble In Little China) is at his gruff best as helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, the taciturn blue-collar Joe called upon to play “hero”, Keith David (Pitch Black, Carpenter’s They Live) angrily flexes his acting and physical muscles as hot-tempered researcher Childs, Donald Moffat crumbles as ineffectual station commander Garry, and screen legend Wilford Brimley effortlessly makes the exposition compelling as tightly-wound biologist Blair.  The freezing Antarctic atmosphere perfectly complements the razor-edged suspense, the idea that ANYONE could be the creature lending every scene a palpable sense of implied threat, while the science of the fiction is thankfully largely put on the back-burner in favour of the story and scares; meanwhile there’s a cheeky edge of jet black humour throughout, from the scuttling disembodied head to Garry’s explosive reaction to MacReady’s improvised humanity-test.  Rob (The Howling, Robocop, Fight Club) Bottin’s fantastically nightmarish creature effects are a magnificent achievement, still looking as good today as they did back in 1982, while master composer Ennio Morricone’s subtle, atmospheric score is a triumph of creepy, insidious subliminal effect.  For me, this film is the definition of fear – the idea that the threat could be literally ANYONE, that you could even become that yourself, be taken over completely, body and soul, is absolutely terrifying, and Carpenter executes this potential reality with surgical precision from the intriguing, icy start to the bleak, desolate ending.  Perfect.

HE NEVER DIED

Dir./Wri. JASON KRAWCZYK; Music. JAMES MARK STEWART; Starring. HENRY ROLLINS, BOOBOO STEWART, STEVEN OGG, JORDAN TODOSEY, KATE GREENHOUSE, JAMES CADE, MICHAEL CRAM, DAVID RICHMOND-PECK, DON FRANCKS; R.T. 99 mins; 2016, USA/Canada

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Jack (Rollins) is an introverted loner who lives his quiet life according to a simple routine to protect himself from awkward social interaction, and others from the fact that he’s actually an immortal cannibal who’s been alive since Biblical times, staving off his murderous impulses by regularly ingesting donor blood he acquires through an underhanded deal with local hospital intern Jeremy (Stewart).  This is all changes the night Andrea (Todosey), the adult daughter he never knew he had, turns up on his doorstep, sparking a calamitous chain of events that shatters Jack’s peace-and-quiet once and for all.

WHY IT’S LOST: While it’s been mostly well received by critics and embraced by fans of darker, edgier horror cinema, rightly earning itself a small cult following, writer-director Jason Krawczyk’s feature debut arrived VERY MUCH under the radar, debuting at South By Southwest before receiving a very limited cinematic release and going straight to VOD and DVD (which is where I stumbled across it).  It’s had some small success on Netflix, and there have been plans to spin it off into a miniseries, with both Krawczyk and Rollins returning, since 2014, but that seems to have been stuck in Development Hell for a while now …

WHY YOU SHOULD DISCOVER IT:  Personally, I’d love to see Jack return, one way or another – this is a BRILLIANT film, an unapologetically non-PC jet black comedy horror that quietly revels in the fantastically understated, matter-of-fact anti-heroics of its soft-spoken, hangdog lead.  Henry Rollins is an absolute riot throughout, underplaying magnificently even in the face of the most over-the-top moments to provide the film with its irresistible secret weapon, the former rock star-turned-stand-up comic and character actor turning in what must surely be the finest performance of his career – Jack makes no apologies for what he is, even when he’s prying bullets from his skull so they won’t give him migraines when the wounds heal, he’d much rather you just left him alone to enjoy a nice game of bingo, but if you mess with him he’ll beat you to death without changing his expression.  He’s provided with compelling support from a strong cast of solid talent – Degrassi’s Jordan Todosey is acerbic and sassy as Andrea, while relative unknown Kate Greenhouse seems sweet but ultimately shows some steel as downtrodden diner waitress Cara, the one person Jack seems capable of forming a bond with, Booboo Stewart goes a long way to distance himself from Twilight as flaky young chancer Jeremy, and Steven Ogg (Better Call Saul, The Walking Dead, Westworld) is a sleazy pleasure as the film’s nominal villain, Alex, a low-rent crime boss who’s also the son of Jack’s former employer (back when he worked as a bouncer and mob enforcer) – but this is VERY MUCH Rollins’ film, and he deserves every lick of praise he receives for it.  It’s definitely not for the easily offended – the film never shies away from the violence that it delivers by the blood-soaked bucket-load – but it’s surprisingly sophisticated, from the pitch-perfect character moments to the darkly satirical social observation and razor sharp wit of Krawczyk’s top-drawer script, and there are moments of calm introspection and surprising pathos dotted throughout that keep things from getting TOO overblown.  Altogether, then, this is a cracking piece of work, a genuine mini-masterpiece of jet black comedy, and I still hold out hope that we haven’t seen the last of Jack …

CAST A DEADLY SPELL

Dir. MARTIN CAMPBELL; Wri. JOSEPH DOUGHERTY; Music. CURT SOBEL; Starring. FRED WARD, JULIANNE MOORE, DAVID WARNER, ALEXANDRA POWERS, CLANCY BROWN, CHARLES HALLAHAN, ARNETIA WALKER, RAYMOND O’CONNOR; R.T. 96 mins; 1991, USA, TV Movie

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: In an alternate 1948 Los Angeles where everyone uses magic, private investigator Harry Philip Lovecraft (Ward) is the exception, shunning spells and talismans in favour of good old-fashioned detective work and finely-honed instinct.  His latest case may be the death of him, however, when he’s hired by rich, reclusive historian Amos Hackshaw (Warner) to find a valuable grimoire that was stolen from him – the Necronomicon …

WHY IT’S LOST: Because it was a TV movie, basically. As is, frustratingly, usually the case with TV movies from the 80s and 90s, this has largely been lost in the years since its release, despite being a modest hit at the time, garnering critical praise and raking in some prestigious TV awards – it’s built up a decent cult following (and rightly so), but you’ll still be hard-pressed to find a decent copy floating around …

ABSENTIA

Dir./Wri. MIKE FLANAGAN; Music. RYAN DAVID LEACK; Starring. KATIE PARKER, COURTNEY BELL, DAVE LEVINE, JUSTIN GORDON, MORGAN PETER BROWN, JAMES FLANAGAN, SCOTT GRAHAM, IAN GREGORY, DOUG JONES, CONNIE VENTRESS; R.T. 91 mins; 2011, USA

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Daniel Riley (Brown) has been missing for seven years, and his wife Tricia (Bell) is ready to move on with her life, preparing to have him declared dead in absentia.  Then her sister Callie (Parker), a recovering drug addict, comes to stay with her, and old feelings are stirred up for the siblings – Callie becomes obsessed with an underpass tunnel in the neighbourhood, which seems to hold strange, foreboding significance for some of the locals, while Tricia starts to imagine Daniel is haunting her.  Then something truly unprecedented turns both their lives upside down …

WHY IT’S LOST: While it marked the feature debut of Mike Flanagan – writer-director of (much-deserved) cult horror hits such as Oculus, Hush and Netflix’s recent breakout smash series adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, soon to return to the fertile creative lands of Stephen King’s imagination (after the underappreciated Gerald’s Game) with this autumn’s adaptation of The Shining’s sequel, Doctor Sleep – this was only really a hit during its EXTREMELY limited release through a variety of 2011 film festivals, winning some small acclaim and a slew of awards but subsequently crawling in WAY under the radar on its release to frustratingly vanilla DVD and VOD.  Then again, this is a seriously micro-budgeted indie (largely funded on Kickstarter to the spell of just $70,000) with a very low-key mumblecore vibe and seriously slow-burn pace that certainly wouldn’t have been to everyone’s tastes anyway …

WHY YOU SHOULD DISCOVER IT:  Thing is, despite its VERY humble beginnings, as debuts go this is an absolute BLINDER. I first came to Flanagan through Oculus, but I stumbled across this not long after, and I was INSTANTLY impressed by just how much of his brilliantly dark, edgy intelligence and consummate skill for intense, knuckle-whitening suspense and skin-crawling atmospherics was already very much in evidence.  Flanagan frequently makes a virtue out of the severely limiting trappings of a tight budget, and here he played a wonderfully inventive game with what we CAN’T see to really ramp up our sense of unease, even downright TERROR, while the ultimate nature of the central threat, once revealed, is both spectacularly original and downright fascinating even at its most repulsive.  The cast may be made up almost entirely of unknown talent (Doug Jones is pretty much the only familiar face here), but they’re far from amateurs – Katie Parker and Courtney Bell make a compelling central pair, their familiar-but-strained on-screen relationship effortlessly selling them as real, flesh-and-blood sisters, making it VERY EASY INDEED for us to invest in them, while Dave Levine is likeable but complex as personally-invested local cop Ryan Mallory, and the director’s own brother, James Flanagan, delivers an impressively twitchy, edgy turn as a potential local serial killer.  It may be a slow-burn affair, taking its time to get going while it sets up the story and gets to know its characters, but this is a film that works its way under the skin with insidious ease, while we’re never quite sure if the icky supernatural threat is real or just in Callie’s head, the consistently tricky narrative throwing us plenty of impressive twisty curveballs and ramping up the uneasy paranoia before dropping a powerful downer on us with the bleakly open-ended climax.  Brilliant, devious and thoroughly astonishing, this was a magnificent debut for one of the best young talents operating in horror cinema today.

PONTYPOOL

Dir. BRUCE McDONALD; Wri. TONY BURGESS; Music. CLAUDE FOISY; Starring. STEPHEN McHATTIE, LISA HOULE, GEORGINA REILLY, HRANT ALIANAK, RICK ROBERTS, BOYD BANKS, TONY BURGESS, RACHEL BURNS; R.T. 95 mins; 2009, Canada

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:  Pontypool is the small town in Ontario where former big city shock-jock Grant Mazzy (McHattie) has fallen on hard times, now relegated to presenting a morning show on local radio.  He enjoys waxing lyrical about obscure topics and rubbing his producer, Sydney Briar (Houle), up the wrong way, but he’s nonetheless growing restless, missing the old days … until Pontypool becomes ground zero for a sudden outbreak of a deadly virus that starts to turn the populace into a raging mass of crazed killers.

WHY IT’S AWESOME:  This is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most unique and ingenious horror movies I have EVER seen.  Adapted from his own cult novel Pontypool Changes Everything by quirky “absurdist” novelist and screenwriter Tony Burgess and directed by cult Toronto New Wave filmmaker Bruce McDonald (Roadkill, Hard Core Logo), this brilliant little indie horror could easily be considered one of the genre’s most effective secret weapons – EVERYONE I’ve turned onto this has FREAKED OUT over it as much as I did, rightly blown away by its imaginative execution and deeply unusual and fiendishly effective solution to the over-familiarity of the “zombie” outbreak trope.  The manner of the “infection” is INSPIRED, a kind of freakish fast-hitting mental illness where specific spoken words become lethally contagious carriers, driving sufferers into brutal homicidal rages and causing them to form deadly, chanting swarms. But this is not a BIG film, instead going for a far more intimate, lo-fi single-location take which turns its tight budgetary constraints into a surprising strength (Burgess was inspired by Orson Welles’ revolutionary radio-play presentation of War of the Worlds, not just in the story but also the format).  The more epic blockbuster elements are mostly interpreted through eye-witness accounts as outsiders call into the show’s hotline, leaving the true horror of situation to be rammed home by a far more focused and thoroughly harrowing scene that plays painfully close to home.  The mighty combo of McDonald and Burgess bring a palpable atmosphere of tension and mounting terror made all the more powerful by the (largely) unseen nature of the dangers, but the film would have fallen flat with a less talented cast to bring it to life – Stephen McHattie is one of the best Canadian character actors working in the business, with a great wealth of consistently exceptional work to his credit (these days he’s probably best known for supporting turns in the likes of 300, Watchmen and A History of Violence), but I personally regard THIS to be the best performance he has EVER turned in, turning Grant into an arrogant, grandiose showboating intellectual manages to win our sympathies despite his laundry-list of glaring character defects, making him an enjoyably fallible, unconventional hero; relative unknown Lisa Houle, meanwhile, makes Sydney a rewardingly down-to-earth foil for Grant’s overblown eccentricities, a whip-smart pragmatist who grows increasingly frustrated and exasperated with him as the crisis unfolds, This Movie is Broken star Georgina Reilly is endearingly sweet but salty as their technical assistant Laurel-Ann Drummond, a former soldier recently returned from the War On Terror, and Hrant Alianak (Family Viewing, Billy Madison) does a cracking job of explaining what MIGHT be going on without becoming an info-dumping bore in a wonderfully oddball performance as local shrink Dr. Mendez. Bold, brash, fascinating and thoroughly challenging, this is a FANTASTIC piece of work, a pretty-much-perfect short-sharp-shock of a horror flick that deserves every lick of the fringe success and acclaim it’s received, and plenty more besides (it’s even got a deeply weird but absolutely essential post credits cut-scene that definitely makes it worth sticking around until the very end).  An absolute, unreserved MUST-SEE.

RAVENOUS

Dir. ANTONIA BIRD; Wri. TED GRIFFIN; Music. MICHAEL NYMAN & DAMON ALBARN; Starring. GUY PEARCE, ROBERT CARLYLE, DAVID ARQUETTE, JEREMY DAVIES, JEFFREY JONES, JOHN SPENCER, STEPHEN SPINELLA, NEAL McDONOUGH, JOSEPH RUNNINGFOX, SHEILA TOUSEY; R.T. 100 mins; 1999, United Kingdom/USA/Czech Republic/Slovakia

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Captain John Boyd (Pearce), a “hero” of the Mexican-American War, is transferred to the remote military outpost of Fort Spencer, deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains, to cover up his cowardice during a decisive victory.  His peaceful isolation is shattered by the arrival of Colqhoun (Carlyle), a half-starved escapee from an ill-fated wagon-train, which prompts the garrison to head out into the frozen wilderness to rescue the remaining survivors.  What they find is a nightmare …

WHY IT’S LOST: Ocean’s 11 screenwriter Ted Griffin’s jet black comic horror, inspired by the real life cannibalism of the Donner Party Massacre, had such a troubled production history it’s a miracle it made it to the screen at all – three weeks into the shoot, original director Milcho Manchevski, whose relationship with executives at production company Fox 2000 was already badly strained, was booted from the project; the producers then brought in Raja Gosnell, who was roundly rejected by the cast, leading to his own replacement by Antonia Bird, the recommendation of Robert Carlyle, who’d previously worked with her on British crime thriller Face.  The shoot continued to hit speed-bumps with Bird also getting rubbed up the wrong way by the producers, and when the film was finally released it was met with mixed reviews by critics who clearly didn’t know what to make of it, badly underperforming at the box office (ultimately making just two million against a $12 million budget) and vanishing into relative obscurity.