Dusk Til Dawn Horror Marathon 2

Three years ago, the Alamo Drafthouse and Ain’t It Cool News came together to host a horror party. The Dusk Til Dawn horror-a-thon was held at the old abandoned Austin State School complete with a tour of the infirmary and free access to the graveyard. Now, in 2005, they have regrouped to attack again. It’s time for Dusk Til Dawn 2!

Ok. It wasn’t quite as exciting as last time just because it was held at the Alamo. Nothing quite beats watching movies about insane people at an actual asylum. But we saw some good movies this year.

The only question: why did it take two years to get this together again?

But off we go into the movies.

DEVIL TIMES FIVE

I’ve seen my share of insane kid movies: The Good Son, Village Of The Damned, (yeah, it kinda counts), The Bad Seed. But nothing ever quite prepared me for 70s teen idol Leif Garrett.

In Devil Times Five, Leif plays a kid who, along with four friends from a nearby asylum, terrorizes a group of people in a big vacation home way up in the (I guess) Colorado mountainside. Each kid has a specialty (one is an army aficionado, one is a pyro, one loves fish), but Leif is a little harder to put a handle on. He’s an actor, but he’s also a cross-dresser. And he possibly has at least two personalities. And he’s just a really weird kid. He wears a wig (maybe even two different ones, but no one ever comments on that) all the time. In fact, I don’t think the adults ever see him without a wig.

Beyond that, this movie co-stars Sorrell Booke. If you don’t know that name.well, I wouldn’t really be surprised. You and I know him better as Boss Hogg. He plays a weak-willed man who really, really wants a job with his wife’s dad. Of course, when he finally gets the balls to ask for it, Leif kills him. And, just to show you how ineptly this movie was written, when Leif tells the adults, “It was George! He came out of nowhere and threw the axe!” no one stops to ask him “Who in the FUCK is George!?!?”

This is a pretty fun flick, but it’s pretty damn bad, too. There are entire scenes played out in slow-motion. In fact, any scene where someone is killed is in slo-mo. Why? No one knows. But when slo-mo drags an already boring death scene into a ten minute endeavor of no blood flow, someone needs to change directors. (And I’m not exaggerating. The first death scene, where the kids kill a priest who was supposed to be driving them to their new asylum, was 10 minutes long. The priest didn’t die because he was being stabbed by a Swiss Army knife. He died of fucking boredom.)

If you’re a fan of Leif Garrett (and who isn’t?!), search for this one just to see him play one of the strangest kid villains in film history. Or if you’re a fan of cat fights, which I also happen to know that everyone is, check this out. Two of the hotter chicks in the movie get into it, complete with exposed boobies. Otherwise, then skip this one. Even a cheesy horror hound like me was a little bit underwhelmed.

THREE…EXTREMES

In 2002, three Asian directors got together to make an anthology film of horror stories. Apparently, Three was good enough to warrant this sequel.

If Three….Extremes is any indication of the quality of the first one, I’m going on a search for that one now.

The first film, Dumplings, is by Fruit Chan. Now, I’ve never heard of Fruit, but I’m very interested in finding his other films. The Hong Kong filmmaker has crafted a tale of a woman’s obsession with looking younger. She finds Mei (Bai Ling from Sky Captain), a woman who makes dumplings that supposedly make the consumer look and feel younger with every serving. But when she finds out what’s in the dumplings will she keep eating them?

This is definitely the best of the three stories. It’s highly, HIGHLY disturbing. No. Really. It’s fucking disturbing as all hell. And it shows the lengths that some people will go to just to keep their youth. And, believe me, there are some people who would go to this extreme.

By the way, that’s HK superstar Tony Leung Ka Fai as the woman’s lecherous husband. Cut, the film by Chan-wook Park (Oldboy, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance), is the story of a man who wants revenge for.well, no one really knows. He takes a director hostage and threatens to cut off one of his pianist wife’s fingers for every five minutes that he doesn’t kill a little girl tied up in the same room with them. By the end, some interesting tables have turned.

The problem was that we don’t really understand what those tables are. The film was a little bit disjointed and confused. But it was a lot of fun getting there. The kidnapper, Won-hie Lim, was very funny and full of all kinds of energy. He makes this whole film worth seeing.

The final film, Box, is by one of my favorite directors, Takashi Miike. It’s about a woman whose past as a circus performer comes back to haunt her every night. Did she have something to do with her twin sister’s death? Is there something more sinister at work?

Miike’s work has always been very fast and kinetic. Which is why I’m a little suspicious that someone else took his body over while he made this short film. It’s incredibly slow. I’m not saying this as a bad thing. It’s actually a very good short. But it’s not Miike. It’s almost closer to Kurosawa or Ozu. The only thing that betrays Miike’s real film personality is the bizarre twist ending. THAT’S the Miike that I know and love.

But it’s good to see him branch out and do something a little different. (Not that every movie he makes isn’t completely different from the last, but you can always tell a Miike film.) I’ll be interested to see where he goes after this.

So, yeah. This is the film of the night that everyone who loves horror or suspense (or, in the case of Dumplings, being incredibly disturbed) should seek out. It’s coming out at the end of October in a limited release. I hope it gets a wider one soon after that. I think horror kids will love it. Although Dumplings could be pretty controversial.

DEATHDREAM

Most people know Bob Clark from his big comedies like Porky’s or A Christmas Story. A few even know him from his clunkers like Rhinestone, From The Hip or Loose Cannons. And even fewer know that he directed the mega-bomb Baby Geniuses AND it’s sequel.

What a lot of people don’t know is that he cut his teeth on cheesy horror movies. His first released movie, She-Man, was about a violent transvestite who blackmails a soldier into cross-dressing. But his second film, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, besides having one of the greatest titles of all time, is the one that horror fans look on with a gleam in their eye.

But Deathdream has been kind of lost. And, while it’s really not a very good movie at all, there’s a great film in here somewhere. You just have to rip it out of the movie that got made.

What Clark did in this 1974 movie is take the story of The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs and mixed it into a Vietnam post-traumatic stress syndrome story.

A family is waiting for their son, Andy (Richard Backus), to come back from Vietnam. Every night mom Christine (Lynn Carlin) prays for Andy’s return. She prays so hard, in fact, that Andy hears her when he is shot and killed in the first scene.

And that’s where the horror starts. Andy somehow makes it home after being declared dead. (The family even got one of the dreaded notes from the government.) But dad (John Marley-the guy who woke up with the horse head in The Godfather) is suspicious. Is Andy killing people along the way? Is he dangerous to his family?

I think that if Clark had had a real budget and real actors (and a real script for that matter) he could have made a great film out of this story. Yeah, it’s a zombie movie basically, but it’s also a great social commentary. This guy comes back from the war and he’s completely fucked up. He’s suddenly very quiet and occasionally very volatile. He lashed out at a bunch of kids in the neighborhood, kills a dog that he loved before the war and doesn’t seem to want to see any of his friends anymore. His mother is still just as over-protective as ever. (The only thing she’s worried about is the fact that he’s not eating.) His dad is worried that he’s going to go too far. (“I came back from a war! I was never like this!”) And the entire community seems to be against him.

Of course, it doesn’t help that he needs blood to stay alive and fresh looking. But the budget is what really kills this one. The opening scene in Vietnam looks like it was filmed in my back yard. The makeup makes Andy look like a kid who just hasn’t gotten enough sun. And most of the actors are strictly amateur hour. Even Marley and Carlin (both John Cassavetes alums) are pretty terrible.

The one exception is Andy himself. While he’s not necessarily a good actor, he is incredibly creepy. And then there’s his girlfriend, Joanne (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things’ Jane Daly). She is truly the only living character in the whole movie. She is vibrant, funny and actually kind of fun to watch in her very few scenes.

I hear that Eli Roth is trying to do a remake of this movie. That could be really cool. The story is awesome and deserves a better translation to film. This one’s on DVD, so check it out. It’s worth slogging through the weirdness to get to the story that Clark was trying to get across.

THE ROOST

I missed this one at South By Southwest this year. And, while I was a little pissed at the time, I kept hearing really horrible things about it. So I wasn’t too concerned by the end of the festival.

Imagine my surprise when it shows up during this little mini-festival. I was expecting to fall asleep for an hour and a half from sheer boredom.

Well, it wasn’t all THAT bad, but it still wasn’t very good.

Four kids are on a road trip (never heard that one before) to a wedding when their car goes off the road into a ditch. They can’t get it out, so they decided to go to a house that’s about a mile or so down the road. Unfortunately for them, it was a house where the old couple who lived there had already been killed by an unseen creature or group of creatures.

Things just get worse for the kids from there.

This movie falls into the trap that pretty much all creature feature/slasher flicks fall into. The kids go into the barn when they really have no reason to. They run around when they should just stay put. They come out of rooms where they’re safe when they should just not fuckin’ move! What the fuck is wrong with these kids?! Be cowards! You’ll survive! Hell, even the old folks at the beginning are stupid. The old man decides to go lock the barn that he apparently hasn’t even been into for about 20 years. It has fallen WAY into disuse. And he’s never really noticed the ceiling or all of the bats hanging out up there. Then his wife runs in there after him. Neither of them think to actually turn on the damn lights! They just walk right into the barn to investigate weird noises. Into the pitch black barn. And none of the kids are any smarter. And they don’t even know the barn.

Now, let’s talk about that barn. Apparently it’s the same barn that was used in Hitchcock’s Marnie back in 1964. But I don’t remember that barn being nearly as complex as this one. A cop walks in on the ground floor and, without ever going up any stairs, falls out of an upstairs window. The kids run through the barn and end up somewhere in the loft. Stairs go up, down and all around. There are basements and sub-basements. No wonder these kids were getting killed in there. They were getting lost in a fucking barn! The damn thing was designed by Escher.

But enough about that. Does the movie deliver on the visceral level that horror movies are supposed to deliver on?

In a way, yes. There are a LOT of jump scares that are pretty effective. After all of the bitching about this movie, I actually kind of liked it. To an extent. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s certainly not a bad movie, either. And the appearance of Tom Noonan as the host of a tv horror show was interesting, but kind of unneeded. The tv show only interrupted the movie a couple of times, but it seemed kind of weird. (Of course, the Bergmanesque bit with the breaking film during an intense sequence was kinda cool.)

If you’re up for a really cheesy creature feature, check this out. But don’t expect too much.

And for fuck’s sake, DON’T GO IN THE FUCKING BARN!

SHOCK

What’s so weird about these Dusk Til Dawn horror fests is that, even though there are literally MILLIONS of horror movies for them to choose that I’ve never seen, they always pick one that I have seen. In fact, I own a copy of this one. Unfortunately, it’s not one that I necessarily would have owned if I had seen it before I bought it at the sale I found it at.

Shock was Mario Bava’s last movie. He’s the genius behind such classic Italian horror feasts as Black Sabbath, Black Sunday and Danger: Diabolik. He’s also behind the last Dusk Till Dawn’s Twitch Of The Death Nerve.

Personally, I thought that one was pretty boring. (And, in truth, I haven’t seen any of those other films I just called classics. I’ve just heard that they’re great. We’ll see once I actually see them.)

This 1977 film is somewhere in between (I think) the classics and the slow (but awesomely named) Twitch. It’s not really boring, but it’s never really gripping, either.

Daria Nicolodi (girlfriend of Italian horror master Dario Argento, mother of super-freak hottie Asia Argento), stars as Dora, a woman who is just moving back into her home seven years after her first husband committed suicide. She has a new husband, Bruno (John Steiner), who is nothing but helpful to her and her son, Marco (the super creepy David Colin, Jr.).

But, as in all good thrillers, there are secrets under the façade of the perfect family. Little Marco starts acting weird and saying things like, “Mommy. I have to kill you.” He’s obviously got a few issues. But is he the real issue here? Or is there something darker and more sinister going on?

The main problem with this film is probably some of the performances. John Steiner is a pretty terrible actor and, honestly, Daria is not a whole lot better. David is creepy, but he has some of the lamest lines I’ve ever heard. In fact, his first line comes after his mom is calling his name trying to find him. He stops what he’s doing, looks at the camera and says, “Marco! That’s my name!” I thought he was going to be the narrator through the whole movie. But this is just a really weird performance from a really weird kid.

But the story is not bad and Bava, even this late in his life, knows how to build suspense and turn a mediocre flick into a pretty good suspense movie that is worth seeking out for his fans.

DEVIL FETUS

Wow. What a title. This is what horror movies (especially Hong Kong horror movies) are all about. Death, dismemberment and utter weirdness.

This 1983 movie is about…um…yeah. Something about a woman who is fucked by a demon, then she and her husband die and the soul of the demon possess other people and animals. Not fetuses involved, which may be a good thing. There is a freaky artifact that shows up at the beginning of the movie and then gets broken. Maybe the fetus is the thing that winks at the girl who buys it. I dunno. I don’t really think that writer Man Wah Tsang or director Hung Chuen Lau really knew, either.

But none of that matters. This one is so cool because of its blatant weirdness. There’s a scene where the younger brother of the main character gets possessed and eats his dog. Or the scene where the old holy man tries to exorcise the kid. (This is a classic.) Or the scene where two servants go into the jungle that Bob Clark was looking for in the beginning of Deathdream just to bury the damn dog.

If you’ve never seen a Hong Kong horror movie, this is a great place to start. It may be pretty hard to find, but it’s worth the search. It’s one of the strangest and funniest horror movies I’ve ever seen. And the translation contains the line I used to open this review. I think it got one of the biggest laughs of the marathon as people started to realize what it said.

So here ends the second Dusk Til Dawn horror marathon. We finished up the last movie, said our goodbyes and walked out of the Alamo Drafthouse like the zombies that we all are. I hope they do this again soon. At least sooner than the three years they waited to have this one.