Short Film: THE SUBSTITUTE

THE SUBSTITUTE on Shudder at the time of this posting.
Directed by Nathan Hughes-Berry  • 2015 • English • 24min

Wow! This 24 minute short film was really well done. It has a high creep factor and reflects today's current political and news climate. It's a rather sad reflection of the "male" in today's society.

A substitute teacher starts a job at a school where there is a strong system set in place between boys and girls. Something is very wrong here.

Fantastic acting and a strange, TWILIGHT ZONE / NIGHT GALLERY feel to the whole of it.

I can't wait to see more from Director Nathan Hughes-Berry. Fab style.

And Madeleine Sims-Fewer as the substitute Ms. Byrd was fabulous.

Check it out at once!

Amer

AMER (2009)
Directors: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Writers: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Stars: Cassandra Forêt, Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud, Marie Bos


I love the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. It just makes me so very happy. It's exciting, visually stimulating and mentally challenging on many levels. It's not "light reading" material - you're not going to just toss it on as filler. However it ticks off so many boxes and works on so many levels that I think the films are very re-watchable and highly entertaining if you like the style.

We're talking very Bava, Argento (early Argento) giallo style films with lots of curious scenes and some wondrous, dream-like cinematography.

AMER is the story of a girls life. But, not an ordinary life. Not an ordinary film, either. It's a film in three parts, looking at her life as a child, maturing teen and a woman. Each section is handled in a stylistic way and each could be looked at by itself or as the full set.

Cassandra Forêt plays the young girl in the first section. This area has a very Argento feel. Something is going on in the girls house and the mother and father chat in whispers while the grandma deals with... something...downstairs.  The girl peeks through keyholes and ventures out to investigate and things get very, very strange and creepy. I think this was my favorite section. It has very little dialog, but a rich storytelling that I enjoyed a lot. Creepy shadows and characters bump around the old house and creep about creating a fantastic, gothic feel with strong, Suspiria-like fantasy tones.

Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud plays the adolescent girl in the second section. This was the most normal section of them all and really just shows the girl getting ready to venture out into the world and away from her mother...and towards men. This section, too, has very little dialog if any at all and is shot in a wondrous style similar to a Milo Manara comic (...without so much sex and nudity, mind you :::grin:::)  Emotion through eyes and lips and actions.

Milo Manara's style seems present

Marie Bos enters as the adult and ventures back to the house where we saw her as a child. The place is a rundown, older home now and is in disrepair. She explores in shadows and something or someone eventually starts shadowing her. More giallo than fantasy horror, this section is also shot beautifully and has some grand, bump-in-the-night moments.


All three sections play like a separate film, but all three work wondrously together as well. While the second section drifts away from horror,  it still works well to show the development of the woman. And I found all three sections to be visually stunning.

As I watch more of the Directors works, I can see that the style is basically the same with their work, but this works for me because I love their style. :)

If you like visuals, arthouse films, the early works of Dario Argento and Italian giallo mysteries, seek this film out.


You may also enjoy:
http://horrorsho.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-strange-color-of-your-bodys-tears.html

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane

I had another FORGET ME NOT experience recently. I watched ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (thanks, Netflix streaming!) and I was sure that it was going to be standard, slasher BS. But, neigh, it's NOT standard fair.

All the boys love Mandy - the sexy, untouched blonde goddess of High School. A party on a farm might provide some boy with her as a prize. However, someone doesn't want the lovely Mandy touched. 

I can't say too much about this film without wrecking the fun. However, it's fresh and interesting and well worth a viddy.

Amber Heard turns in a lovely performance as the titular character and Director Jonathan "Warm Bodies" Levine has a lot of fun with the shots and moves. I might have to check out Warm Bodies after all if this 2006 film feel is present in it at all.



Give MANDY LANE a spin. I think You'll enjoy it. Just do yourself a favor and avoid Google searches or the trailer before seeing it.

Laura Panic

Adam Wingard seems like a guy that is just driven to get stuff out into the world and he's not scared of working hard to do so. From Tumbler to Twitter to events and creative, he seems like he's constantly moving and striving. It's inspiring to see. I've been trying to play catch up with some previous works (I recently caught his co-directed feature Autoerotic - so good) and LAURA PANIC popped into view.






The plot is rather simple in this 2008 short. An obsessed girl follows her love and gets in a bit of a...situation...with his room mate. Did I mention that she's bonkers?

Oh, young love.

While the voice over isn't 100% with me (no voice over ever really is with me), it's the only way this story could be told keeping with it's style. The acting and edits are sound and the Adam Wingard style is definitely there.

I love the work coming out of these indie directors, writers and actors of late. Wingard, West, Barret, Eisener, Sánchez....they are just turning out really grand work and I hope that it keeps on coming!It's also fun to see actors returning to work with the same group from time to time. The "Laura" character was played by Hannah Hughes who went on to be in another Wingard item from V/H/S/2 - the "Phase I Clinical Trials" segment. Working with the same actors and writers seems like a good way to go if everyone wants to keep creating great content. You already know each other and when you hit the set, you're ready to roll. It must be fantastic.

Check out LAURA PANIC. 

Coffin Joe

Why the HELL haven't I seen a Coffin Joe film yet?
Before 2014. It's going to happen. :)

Nurse 3D Trailer

Ok, so....it looks like NURSE 3D might just live up to the super hype machine the past months have given us.

Tales of Paz de la Huerta being truly "off" and walking around the set in the nude even when she's not filming. Talk of the film being off the rails. And the blood drenched Paz poster that made the rounds months ago. 

After seeing the trailer, it looks like this Single White Female-like tale might live up to all the buzz.

Time will tell.


Director Douglas Aarniokoski has a lot of second unit experience and some Director credits that include the Sleepy Hollow TV Series, Criminal Minds TV Series and The Day, so it will be interesting to see what he's been able to do with some big screen goodness.

It could also be a good thing for the writer - David Loughery of 1989s STAR TREK: The Final Frontier fame.


Interesting for sure. But, is it going to be another movie that cashes in sex and sexuality just to be "naughty" unlike AMERICAN MARY that really used it as the icing, not the cake itself - a smart and dark journey into female empowerment by female Directors.  Tongue seems to be firmly in cheek with some of this, but I really hate when women are tossed around on screen in their underwear for no reason at all. Not that I don't like SEEING that, but it's boring and easy and happens far too often, unfortunately for the horror community.

It's going to be a wild ride either way!


The trailer is NOT safe for work (as the freeze frame below suggests) and it packs a lot in.

Creature: Wha Happon'?

The BEST-HORROR-MOVIES.com podcast featuring Director Fred Andrews got me curious about the 2011 film CREATURE. For those who are not aware, Creature was a somewhat low budget (ok, really low budget) horror film that got a major studio release. So major that it failed miserably, dying on the vine and earning a mere $327,000 from the 1507 screens it was shown on. Evidently, it was the lowest grossing first weekend ever for  film being shown on over 1500 screens and the second worst per location...ever. I had to see it.

FROM MOVIELINE:  $220 per screen and 6 people per showing

Now, in the interest of the new mantra of THE HORROR SHOW, there will be no bashing of this film. On the contrary - it's really not as bad as some I've seen.

The plot is super basic. Group of 20-somethings go off for an outing. Said trip sees them wandering too far off the path. There's a monster and "hillbilly bad guys". ::::shrug:::  Stop me if you've seen this before. And, they start dying. Nothing new. Nothing major. The monster design and makeup were fine. I mean, it's a dude in a suit and it's obvious and the lighting doesn't help in hiding the fact. This film is lit up all sorts of ways and in all sorts of dramatic styles. I'm not saying that they work for this film, but...they are there. The story was interesting - a good mix of reality and "it just happened through some sort of magic" that appealed to me. No need to go into the micro-details of how a sad man became this alligator monster man. I'm good with magical unknowns. Sure! Why not? It's an alligator man for cripes sake.

The cast is...there....being the cast. Sid Haig Sid Haigs things up as usual - always fun. "That black dude from True Blood" Mehcad Brooks and "That hot brunette girl...from something I've seen before" Serinda Swan (turns out it was SUPERNATURAL) turn in performances. There's another girl that I'll call "NOT the delicious Linda Cardellini" Amanda Fuller and Lauren Schneider who couldn't hang on to her accent, but was intriguing in that redhead showing her breasts sort of way. The rest, like I said, were there being the cast and saying their lines. :)


Everything was going along just fine as I watched Fred Andrews work his directorial magic and the plot unfolded before me. It was going so well that I found myself saying, "Man, this film REALLY got a bad rap! I bet it was just marketed incorrectly - it's not bad at all."  Then it happened. Everything started to fall apart in a rather spectacular way. 

People were taken away and tied up to be offered to the creature...and their foot was cut off? Um...why? Why did they do that? I...

There were six people in the group. Two couples and a brother and sister. The guy and girl from the couples were brother and sister as well. When the S goes down, the guy asks his buddy to save his sister...but doesn't seem to remember that he had a friggin GIRLFRIEND there as well! LOL "Get my sister safe! To hell with the girlfriend. I can always get another girlfriend!" No, he didn't say it, but he thought it! :)



WHOLE GROUPS OF PEOPLE APPEAR...then just WALK THE F AWAY and DISAPPEAR. People that might have been able to DO something had they stayed. And...where did they go? They just wander away into the swamp area.

The creature bites NUMEROUS people through the film, but proceeds to punch and pummel the guy who fights him in the end instead of just...eating him, really.

It goes on. I'd love to go on as well, but it starts to get mean after a while. :::grin:::  Above all, I was not mad about the time I spent watching this film. (Granted, I was doing other things as well most of the time) I had some laughs. I had some WTF?! moments. I found myself talking at the screen like crazy at the end with a big smile on my face saying things like, "Wait...they keep leaving these women around for the creature to find..." and "HA! POP GOES THE CREATURE! Didn't see THAT coming, did you, Buddy?!"

I had a good time, but I'd NEVER think about sending this thing off to the masses in a friggin theater! A few small theater showings around Halloween - sure, maybe. heheheh

WHAT the HECK was the studio thinking here? It's really their fault that this film failed in the theater. It shouldn't have been there. This would have done well released to DVD and Netflix, doing it's thing and being fine. If anything, it might have done better with more camp and less seriousness, but that's just a personal opinion.

Again, from the MOVIELINE article found here:
"Chalk the failed experiment, perhaps, to the elder Sheinberg's past successes; while at Universal Pictures, Sid Sheinberg released the game-changing Jaws and in the process birthed the blockbuster by forgoing small-scale roll-outs in favor of national release. Creature seemed to similarly attempt to launch a wide-scale release with but without sufficient awareness efforts among a proportionate audience, and as a result the film arrived without enough of a trumpet blast and lacking enough of a draw (great reviews, buzz) to make the gamble work."

I hope that Fred Woods recovers and makes more films. It looks like he's still going strong as a production designer. 

CREATURE is not the problem here and is well worth taking a look at over pizza, beer and popcorn on Netflix some rainy night for fun. It's just a shame that it was pushed out into the world like it was.

Do you like horror movies?

"Do you like 

                            horror movies too?"

VERSUS: Maniac

It's the return of VERSUS!  
 

I did a MANIAC double feature Saturday and Sunday and while I may have been disturbed by the content, I wasn't disappointed in either film.  Both Maniac features were great, genre fair.

I had seen most of the original Maniac ages ago, so I started with the remake so I wouldn't be directly comparing it to the original while watching. I was happy that I took this route - it seemed like the way to go for sure.

The plot of both films is simple. An abused child grows up to be a very mentally disturbed man who slays women to deal with the damage incurred from his toxic mother as a boy . Short, not so sweet and to the point. A point usually found at the tip of a knife blade.

Frank Khalfoun (High Tension) did a marvelous job with the retelling of this little terror tale in the 2012 version. Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur also did a great job updating Joe Spinell's original script. This was key to the whole thing coming together. And the main gimmick of having the film be in first person unless we're seeing a reflection is an amazing feat. It never came off as forced or contrived, which I was sure I was going to be finger wagging about at some point. The execution was spot on. And the one time we drift away from the first person shot really makes sense from the story perspective.



Elijah Wood is no mere Hobbit in this, either. He's really...crazy looking. In that creepy, "tears the wings off of flies" way, too. He's a menacing force that knocks it out of the park. It's a role that many would most likely run from, honestly. Who wants to be "that guy"- the vicious, serials killer of women.






And, that's something that almost had me switching the film off. I knew what the content was and I was familiar with the story, but the violence and visuals associated with the acts are hard to take at times. I'm getting older, I think, and I'm losing my desire to see things like this. I'm leaning more towards unreal ghosty flicks and creatures instead of these real world monstrous humans. However, there was something to the film that transcended the violence for me and I was able to hang in there. I guess it was the strong storyline and fantastic acting. Still, this was not one for the weak of heart. There is some really brutal stuff in here. I'm just not feeling the violence these days....but...you know...I still watch these films. I'll just file that under habit. Or, a bi-polar nature. Not sure. :)


Now the original 1980 version is no cake walk either. It's angry and grungy and gritty with that same violence factor, but it's watchable for other reasons. Joe Spinell's performance as Frank Zito is pitch perfect. While Wood is somewhat charming and "cute", Spinell is just large and chubby and sweaty. He's the unwashed, greasy haired guy you see waiting for a slice on the street or sitting in the subway across from you. The guy you just don't want to be around.



The film has the grindhouse grit of the time and it's a fantastic time capsule for the era. William Lustig's direction is of the era as well and it's a lot of fun to watch. This has to be his top rated film. And Tom

Savini's effects work was top of the line at this point as well. Some of the effects work in Maniac is amazing. (The shotgun scene - whew)

 

Both films hold their own for various reasons and both should be watched and enjoyed (...as much as one can enjoy them...:::grin:::) on their own merits. While the films are the same overall as far as the story goes, they are also very different and I think this makes a strong case for remakes of classic genre films. There were updates made and very interesting takes and changes on the original film. Nothing super major, but the small changes were enjoyable and interesting. The 30 years between the films really helps here as well. When you have 30 or more years between films, there is a lot that can be updated and altered in a very positive way. Again, we are not seeing a remake made of a film made in the same year ::::cough:::  REC  :::cough::::   We have space to play with a major update with a new tone.

I'd still love to see some of my old favorites done in this same, big budget update way. NIGHT OF THE DEMON, THE NIGHT WALKER, and THEM! redone like THE THING? Sign me up! But, it would have to be done well and with some seriousness. That might make the likes of THEM! difficult because you need 50s black and white charm to sell giant ants attacking people. 

This is no NIGHT OF THE DEMONS situation here where the original is clearly the way to go IMHO. Both Maniac versions are well worth checking out. So, I'm calling this a tie.

A Bay of Blood

Mario Bava is so damn good. I love his classic, giallo style. A BAY OF BLOOD aka TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE is a giallo lover's dream. It has all the classic elements.

The plot is super basic. There is a property by the bay owned by a wheelchair bound older woman. She's not selling, but many folks want the property. And...the the killing begin. Neighbors, traveling hippy types and more fall prey to greed and villainy. It seems like everyone has a hidden agenda.

The film is well shot and has that Bava feel. Glamor, lighting and kinetic camera work keep the film moving along even though there isn't much in the way of plot when you really dissect it. Some of the shots are fantastic. The lighting in Bava's movies always gets me.

I love the beauties in his films as well. Classic 70s lovelies. Brigitte Skay (in all her curvy glory :::sigh:::) , Anna Maria Rosati and Claudine Auger to name a few.



And, if you're a horror lover, you might want to add this to your list because many of Bava's deaths in Bay of Blood were stollen...borrowed?....later by other films. There are two that appear in FRIDAY THE 13th films in this alone.  And the film just runs off the rails on the death scale towards the end. And the phrase "Trust No One" is top of mind in this for sure.






Well worth a viddy! The Bay is certainly bloody.

The Theatre Bizarre (2011)

The Theatre Bizarre was another Netflix special - tossed on as a background film while I was doing other things. It turned out to be another one that I stopped and put on when I could actually sit and watch it.

We have another anthology venture here. A woman gets drawn to this strange theater and slips inside. Mannequins and dummies populate seats here and there. She takes a seat herself and Udo Kier walks onto the stage in some of the most creepy dummy makeup I've seen in a while. He introduces the first act and additional dummies come to life on stage...and away we go.

I won't go into much more. We have a series of short horror films presented well, shot well and written well for the most part. The stories are interesting and engaging and well worth a viddy. Sort of like the old HITCHHIKER HBO show from back in the day. Nothing "brilliant", but nothing I wish I had my life back from either.

On Netflix streaming at the time of this post.  Check it!


Directors:

Douglas Buck ... (segment "The Accident")
Buddy Giovinazzo ... (segment "I Love You")
David Gregory ... (segment "Sweets")
Karim Hussain ... (segment "Vision Stains")
Jeremy Kasten ... (framing segments)
Tom Savini ... (segment "Wet Dreams")
Richard Stanley ... (segment "The Mother Of Toads")

Don Henley - Everything Is Different Now

Have you SEEN this nugget from 2009?!?!?!   One of my favorite videos and so damn strange. I really need to do some research on this to see who came up with this idea - Henley or the studio. Headless strippers, zombies...and Don Henley?

Well, he was ahead of the curve, that's for sure. Way to go, Mr. Henley!

:::stumbles around the Internet for a minute....:::

Ah, the song was written for his wife Sharon Summerall. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, sadly. The song makes a little more sense now, though the video still seems out of his wheelhouse.

::::more digging::::::

...and, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino! Ahhhhh.....
Videos for Madonna, Bowie, Björk....


Check it! It's dark!

Don Henley - Everything Is Different Now (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Don Henley