Amoeba Music

Let me cut right to the chase. Bereavement is a real-deal horror film in the sense that it depicts some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen in a genre movie. But the nastiness is necessary and the payoff is earned in the delicate and capable hands of a skilled filmmaker/storyteller such as writer/director Stevan Mena. Yes, this film also acts as a prequel to Mena’s debut feature Malevolence, but it’s also a rare anomaly in the genre. It’s a film that strives to satisfy two different audiences; those that love the first film and want to learn the backstory that comes before the original. And then there are those who are simply walking into it blindly just wanting to see a new, original horror movie. In that regard, he succeeds at delivering what both audiences would want with Bereavement. The biggest difference between the two is that if you already know the previous feature, you kind of know where this story has to inevitably end in order to line-up with Malevolence; whereas newcomers will probably be shocked by the grim, dark descent that the story takes.

Bereavement opens pretty much the same way that Malevolence does; with the kidnapping of little Martin Bristol at the hands of deranged serial killer Graham Sutter. It then cuts 5 years later, and we follow Allison Miller (Alexandra Daddario), a young teen who is forced to move in with her uncle Jonathan (Michael Biehn) and his family after losing her parents in a car accident. She takes some solace in her budding new relationship with her neighbor William (Nolan Funk), whom her uncle doesn’t approve of. But William also has problems of his own. He struggles to care for his verbally abusive, invalid father with hopes of one day "getting outta this town." The great thing about the story arcs of both Allison and Martin is that they run concurrently and eventually collide. Much like Mena did with Malevolence, he’s again combining two genres in the same feature. For Malevolence, it was the action heist film that became a “slasher” movie. Here, it’s pretty much a serious, straightforward hardcore drama that eventually becomes a "slasher" flick.

One of the most remarkable things about the movie Malevolence is how much it authentically captures the vibe and spirit of the early '80s “slasher” films it tries to homage with such reverence. In fact, after I initially saw it in its limited theatrical run back in 2004, I immediately jumped online to confirm that it was in fact a recently made feature film and not a long lost gem from the '80s that was only just then surfacing. Sure enough, upon a bit more research, I discovered that the goal of writer/director Stevan Mena was to emulate the horror films that had had such a profound impact on him growing up. And in that regard, he completely succeeded.

Malevolence opens with the kidnapping of Martin Bristol, a 6-year old boy from Pennsylvania who is forced to watch the evil deeds of his deranged captor, serial killer Graham Sutter. The film then cuts ahead 10 years later where we’re introduced to Julian (Brandon Johnson) and Marylin (Heather Magee) who along with Marylin’s brother Max (Keith Chambers) and Kurt (Richard Glover) are planning a daytime bank robbery. When things don’t go according to plan and the robbery is completely botched, the criminals flee with 2 hostages to their rendezvous point out in the countryside of Pennsylvania, just next to the old Sutter place and meat & poultry slaughterhouse. When they venture out towards the Sutter property, they inadvertently garner the attention of the long dormant killer at the house and uncover the horrors that have been going on there for over a decade. From then on, it’s just a matter of trying to survive the night.

In terms of B-Movie all-star casts this crazy British flickVenom can’t be beat. All working at their highest ham level, you have the insane German method madman Klaus Kinski (Aguirre: The Wrath of God), and then there’s the American Sterling Hayden who in the fifties was a total stiff playing a lot of tough guys but then reinvented himself in the seventies as an solid character actor (The Godfather). Also on board is the great British actor Oliver Reed (The Devils) who was equally famous for his up and down career as he was for his drunken on-set behavior. Adding some more class to the cast is another terrific British actor Nicol Williamson who, other then his great performance as Merlin in Excalibur, never quite had the career he should’ve had. Rounding out the cast in the female roles, there’s swinging sixties British starlet Sarah Miles (Blow-Up), fashion-model-turned-actress Cornelia Sharpe (Serpico) and the always sexy Susan George (Straw Dogs). For a low budget flick Irwin Allen couldn’t have assembled a cooler line-up.

Director Piers Haggard was fresh off directing Peter Sellers’s final film, a horrible wreck called The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. He replaced the American director Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) who was fired for creative reasons days into filming Venom. What’s ironic is that a few years later Hooper would make one of the craziest British genre mash-ups of all time, the zombie/alien/vampire flick Life Force. In the meantime Venom still stands as another solid genre mash-up; it’s both a kidnapping thriller and a snake-on-the-loose flick, and it does both very well.

A young, neatly dressed boy sits in his room mumbling the lyrics to the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme with the words, “couldn't put the pieces back together again” the most audible. He's kneeling over a puzzle in deep thought when his mother enters the room and peers over his shoulder to look at it. It's a jigsaw of a naked woman, and in disbelief and outrage she starts slapping her son around. She instructs him to go get a plastic bag so that she can throw away the “filth.” She compares him to his no-good father and breaks the mirror with his framed portrait before rummaging through his things looking for a smut stash. The boy returns with an ax and hacks her to death before sawing off her head. He then returns to and completes his puzzle with blood-smeared hands. During the time it took for him to dismember his mother, their maid quizzically stood outside the home wondering why no one answered the door. She worries that something's amiss, so she gets a pair of policemen to break the door down. The boy hides in the closet while the maid and the officers search for him and his mother. They find her head on a chest of drawers and him standing in a closet hollering for his mother and creating the impression that an intruder killed her. The adults believe him and send him to live with his aunt.

Forty years pass and the plot is now focused on a university at which a girl has been murdered with a chainsaw. The details become grizzlier when they discover that a part of the girl's body is missing from the scene. Detectives Bracken (Christopher George) and Holden (Frank Brana) are on the case snooping around the school and asking questions. The Dean (Edmund Purdom) of the university is more than willing to give them access to the school’s resources in order to catch the killer. Meanwhile, Kendall (Ian Sera), the campus Romeo, is flirting with a girl he intends to meet later at the campus pool. Their meeting never happens because she becomes the killer's next victim. The detectives start to believe that someone on the campus is the killer, so they interview the staff and look to Kendall for help in profiling students since they've ruled him out as a suspect. Despite their diligence, more girls are found cut to pieces. The viewer watches from the killer's point-of-view as each stomach-churning death unfolds. The disgust is amplified by extreme close-ups of the chainsaw sinking into what looks like real flesh, and the sound of the killer's heavy breathing alongside blood-curdling screams. You then see cut-away shots of his gloved hands returning to the old bloody jigsaw puzzle and carting limbs into an industrial-sized refrigerator.

The summer of 1975 saw a decline in beach activity and beach resort profits, not because of anything that happened in real life, but because what happened in the cinemas that summer. It was a little film, by a twenty-something director, that due to technical problems was barely able to get out of the water. At the time of its release Jaws may have been the biggest cultural blockbuster since Gone With The Wind. It was all the talk, all the rage, and its effect on beach life and the reputation of sharks is still felt today. But more importantly, hype aside, Jaws is also some good old-fashioned filmmaking, and is still one of the greatest adventure, horror films ever.

In the mid '70s it was rare for a director of a major studio movie to only be in his 20s, but after a string of acclaimed TV movies, including the landmark thriller Duel, Steven Spielberg was called a wunderkind. His first go at the big screen, The Sugarland Express with Goldie Hawn, was a well done road picture. Though it was steeped in '70s rebellion, it didn’t come close to revealing just how in touch with the pulse of audiences Spielberg would prove to be.

The People Under the Stairs is absolutely bonkers. It's as if David Lynch and Wes Craven took a field trip to the ghetto and came away with an outrageous idea for a thriller/horror movie. Everett McGill and Wendy Robie of Twin Peaks take on another strange domestic role as a brother and sister who never seemed to grow out of playing house and who like to steal children. The movie shares the same violent color schemes and unsettling (yet somehow humorous) dialogue that you find in practically every Lynch film.

Following the newly 13-year-old Poindexter “Fool” Williams (Brandon Quintin Adams), the story opens up with a tarot reading from his older sister Ruby that warns of a year filled with death and ignorance. The two siblings are struggling to make ends meet as their mother is slowly dying of cancer. They're the only tenants remaining in a building that their landlord wishes to tear down in order to make room for condos and tenants who aren't predominately black. Ruby's boyfriend Leroy (Ving Rhames) is a petty criminal who's tired of seeing families thrown to the streets and offers Fool an alternative in making the payments they need to stay there. He's come across a map of the landlord's home and plans to rob it. Rumor has spread across generations that the steep rent and poor conditions of the ghetto has led to a ton of profits for the landlord. This money, thought to be a mass hoard of gold coins, is said to be inside and Leroy wants to get his hands on it.

Could you imagine what it would be like to finish an exhausting shift at a retail job, only to find upon closing that there is a killer who wants to use the abundance of box cutters and deli knives to expose your innards? Well, that's where this slasher movie begins, and that is just the beginning of its craftiness. Slasher films are usually really good about having slaughter come in the most inopportune times: swimming, camping, love making, eating and so forth. I think this adds that special tension that comes along with horror films—the old “don't go up the stairs” warning you try to tell the characters by squirming in your seat. Intruder lacks this tension at first because you're not exactly sure what's going on, and with the large cast and lack of character background with any of them, it's hard to decipher where everyone is and who is still alive. Perhaps that's a good thing. Surely when the movie's awesome kill scenes surface, you really don't care who gets the ax; you just want to see how many horrible ways someone could be murdered within an hour at a supermarket.

As mentioned before, the cast is considerably large for a slasher, and they are killed rather swiftly. I couldn't really catch most of the characters' names or tell Ted and Sam Raimi apart, but it really doesn't matter. Jennifer (Elizabeth Cox) and her coworker Linda (Renée Estevez) are the only two employees at the registers when it comes time to close at their supermarket. Meanwhile, all the male workers are busy cleaning, butchering meat, and adding numbers in various parts of the store. The last customer to be rung up is Jennifer 's ex-boyfriend who was recently released from prison. Their breakup has left him a little disgruntled, and he picks a fight with her. When the fight turns physical, all the male workers attack and kick the brute out. The police are called and can't find him, so everyone goes about their routine closing, which seems to take much longer than it normally should. They all get together and one of the veterans there expresses his disappointment that the store will be closing and the property handed over to the government. A little more prep work is done for the following day, but when it comes time for everyone to leave, no one is able to make it out of the front door. Using meat hooks in the cooler, table saws, box cutters and various knives, a mysterious killer has infiltrated the store and intends on leaving no one standing. But is Jennifer's woman-beating boyfriend the culprit or does someone else have a score to settle?

A half decade before his breakthrough films Salvador and Platoon would make Oliver Stone a major director with a political conscience, The Hand proves to be an odd film for Stoneaphiles. It’s his second following his unwatchable low budget horror flick, Seizure, and it works well as a suspenseful psychological horror thriller, but more importantly it proves that no matter how ridiculous the material Michael Caine makes anything worth watching.

Caine plays a successful comic book artist in Vermont. He and his younger wife (Andrea Marcovicci) are having marital problems - his wife wants to go to New York City to study at a groovy yoga center, he just wants to be left alone. He loses his hand in a freak car accident, which is the worst thing that can happen to an artist. The hand is never found. He is forced to get a mechanical prosthetic glove. After his wife leaves him, he takes a job teaching at a central California college. He begins an affair with a student (Annie McEnroe) and gets a yahoo drinking buddy (Bruce McGill, D-Day in Animal House and later a respected character actor in films like The Insider). Suddenly people around him start to turn up dead (including director Stone playing a wino). They are murdered on screen by a walking hand, but it may all be in Caine’s head. Is he actually doing the killing?

My appreciation for the 3rd installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise skyrocketed after watching Christopher Nolan's Inception. Yes, it takes itself less seriously. Hell no, it never received any Oscar buzz. Yes, it's outright cartoonish at times, And, no, you can't convince me I've lost my mind for thinking this (if I'm insane you wouldn't be able to win an argument with me anyway). A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors is actually the more sensible, and even more creative film. Re-watching it again recently, I was in awe of its inventiveness with dream logic, and its surreal special effects and production design. It also establishes an idea within two minutes that Nolan completely fails at with 148: that death within a dream has high consequences.

Nightmare 3 ignores whatever happened in Part Two, and so it's not required viewing beforehand (though none of it will make a bit of sense to those who never saw the original Nightmare on Elm Street). The film opens with a teenage artist named Kristen (Patricia Arquette in her first feature-length role). She's mixing coffee grounds with Coke to stay awake, and building a model of a certain creepy house on Elm Street she keeps visiting in her dreams. Soon enough, we're in it with her after she falls asleep, and she's attacked by a razor-gloved, dream-stalking serial killer known as Freddy Krueger. She wakes up in her mother's bathroom holding a razor with slit wrists.

Philosophy, justice, and Catholic theology are blended to a pulp in this breathtaking example of 1970s horror. By the time the '80s rolled around, cinematic exploration with special effects was at its peak in terms of prosthetics and make-up. Several masters - mainly in Italy, America, and Japan - had reached new heights and dug up several techniques from the past that were introduced as early as the silent era. The Sentinel impressed me with both its story and its remarkable efforts to pull off a complicated film. It is an adaptation of Jeffrey Konvitz's novel, and during a Q&A he expressed some issues with it, as I'm sure is natural for a writer in his position. He did have a lot to do with the production and even co-wrote the script. Aside from certain things being changed for the film, it's safe to say that the other large issue he had was with the film's production, claiming that he would have wanted a different director and a slightly different cast. I'll get to why I disagree shortly.

I'm going to attempt to play down all the action in the plot because there is so much of it and to explain it all would be to give away the best parts. In the film we find Alison (Cristina Raines), a model who wants some space from her boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon) and seeks an apartment of her own. She finds a number of places and eventually settles on a well-furnished and roomy place in an old building. The landlady (Ava Gardner) seems more than eager to get her to move in, dropping the price from $600 to $400 in order to seal the deal. On top of the fact that she is not willing to settle, she has other troubles on her mind when she hears the news of her father's death. Her feelings for him are cold due to a shocking revelation about his character that caused her to practically denounce her Catholic faith as a teenager and led to her first attempt to commit suicide. In her building she finds two people who sort of symbolize other father figures. Seen facing from the highest window of the complex is Father Halliran (John Carradine), a blind, reclusive priest. The other is Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith), an overbearing old man who invites himself in on occasion and talks to his animals as if they were people.