THE SERMON

I’ve always had a soft spot for those individuals who really want to make movies, no matter how low the budget gets.  Even if the director is completely inept at least I admire the fact that they tried.  I think the reason I appreciate this so much is that I know that given the time, money and manpower I would probably do the same thing.

But at the same time, I also wouldn’t sell my movie to some no-name printing company so they can send it out to the un-adoring public.

You’ll notice this is one of my shorter reviews.  Why, you ask?  Because I wasn’t about to watch this movie twice.  And I use the word movie very, very loosely when I’m talking about Invitation to Hell.

It isn’t even a feature length presentation (by the grace of God).  This film clocks in at roughly 48 minutes, which is oddly enough exactly the amount of time that doctors will discover you have ticked off the end of your life.

This movie has the worst audio I have ever heard.  Period.  I haven’t got the slightest idea about what the details of the plot are because every character speaks like an adult from Charlie Brown Christmas. I’ve taken the liberty of writing down some of the very important dialogue.  Phonetically.

MAN:              waaa waaa waa waaa waa wa

WOMAN:       Wa wa wa waaaa

MAN:              Wa wa wa brandy

CROWD:         Wa wa wa waaaaaaaaaa…

And so forth.

The movie is also shot on what appears to be low-quality home movie cameras.  Again, this is not the death knell for a movie like this.  It is more a signal, a guarantee if you will that what the director lacks in resources he can make up through quality actors and an interesting story.  The problem in this equation is that Mr. Director didn’t carry through on his end of the bargain.

Even with all that I want to be forgiving.  I want to lend my support to this man’s dream.  My problem is that our director doesn’t have the seIf-recognition to realize just how bad things have gotten.  If there is any attempt at lighting a scene the lights will be placed so if there is any lighting at all it is from directly in front of the actors.  Most of the night scenes are filmed using natural light, so you get lots of cool shots of torches and flashlights moving across a black space.  We’ve already gone over the sound issues.  The technical end of this project just isn’t up to the director’s ambition.

The general plot involves a woman going to a party and getting molested by the Devil or something.  Apparently all of her friends are in some strange and evil cult bent on doing something that we can never quite understand them explain.  Most of the cultists die and the woman and some guy whose name I can’t remember run into the night and live happily ever after.

Maybe I’m being too hard.  Maybe I should try to find my inner love for these type of movies and go along with what the director was trying to say.  Hell, maybe this whole deal is some brilliant satire on the state of movies in today’s society.  Then again, maybe I’ll start laying golden eggs.  And the worst part is I still admire Murphy and hope that he had a blast making the movie.  I just wish I hadn’t watched it.

That’s it, I’m done.  This one broke me.

TODAY’S MENU: (things you can look forward to in this movie)

Blurry camera work; Unintelligible audio; Horrible, horrible acting; Scenes filmed by headlight; Stubborn refusal to accept one’s limitations on a creative vision; Nighttime scenes filmed using natural light; Losing 45 minutes of your life you will never, ever, ever see again

SAINTS:

I guess you could call the main girl our hero.  She does do some stuff.  Oh, and there’s this guy who I think is her boyfriend or something that wrestles the devil.  So that’s pretty cool.

SINNERS

Everyone else in the house.  They’re all evil or possessed or whatever.  I just can’t make myself care anymore.

The budget DVD company that put this disc out and had the nerve to make me waste a full dollar on it.  I blame them above all else.  They didn’t even bother to put a title screen on the DVD.  Just insert and off it goes.

THINGS THAT MADE STINKY GO “WHA…?”

The fact that this movie exists was enough to make Stinky not only go “Wha…?” but also flush away 4 months of sobriety on some bootleg Listerine.  Don’t worry though folks.  Poison control says he’ll be just fine after the pumping and the charcoal treatment!

THE BENEDICTION

This is the most poorly made movie I have ever seen on DVD format.  Our home movies of Christmas have a higher production quality.  It does get one special honor, though.  It’s our first movie to go into the hobo graveyard.

Dig that hole deep, boys

THE SERMON

Television and the movies have never really gotten along.  The big screen and small screen have been waging a war for our attention ever since the first sets were placed in living rooms and dens.

Both sides have their advantages.  Broadcast television is practically free and is always there when you need a moment’s entertainment.  Every show comes with frequent intermissions for you to get a snack or stretch your legs.  You can watch T.V. naked if you want to and have decent upholstery cleaner.

The movies have the money, and are constantly forced to up the “wow factor” in order to draw in more audiences.  Oh, sure, T.V. probably killed the serials, but the bread-and-butter of the cinema has always been the feature film.  Films are crafted through the vision of a few, and as such are much more unique than most shows.  You can show me episodes of series all day long, but I can’t tell a difference in the people who made each one.  Series’ nature is to be familiar and comforting, a sort of McDonaldization of entertainment that grants us the security of knowing that its there for us, all the time.

The other advantage that movies have had is their content.  With the success of recent shows on premium networks, liberated as they are from the constraints facing most broadcast and cable networks, television has done a lot of catching up.  And it is true that our standards are getting more and more lax as the years go by.  Still, the prevalence of disclaimers (this movie had been edited for content and to fit in the time allotted) indicate that for all the great ideas of those who work to keep the magic box alive there are some places they just cannot go.

We’ve all experienced it.  There’s a scene going on and that tiny precognitive part of your brain lets you know something cool is about to happen.  You see the killer jump up from beneath the floorboards, his preferred sharp instrument raised to strike.  You see him swing his arm towards the frozen form of a half-baked teenager…and then you cut to a shot of everyone screaming.  No payoff.  No something cool.  You get to use your imagination and figure out exactly what the Big Bad Killer did to that guy when what you really wanted was to see Stony Mc Bongbong get his Karo-syrup insides splattered across the room.

Where is he going with this, you ask?

Chiller is the sort of outcome you get when you have feature-film ideas and try to water them down enough to be MADE FOR TV.  Even one of horror’s most respected directors, Wes Craven himself cannot find an effective way to work around the refined and somewhat vanilla tastes of the television connoisseur.

Chiller takes on some very big ideas, and Craven should get some credit for trying something so ambitious knowing the limitations of his chosen medium.  But like coming in 10^th place in the Olympics, nobody really cares that you did your best, because you still lost.  And this movie loses quite a bit.

The concept is solid.  A billionaire software developer dies of some disease and rather than have a funeral and drop the casket in the ground his mother takes the Ted Williams route and has his body frozen until a cure can be found for his disease.  Due to a faulty tank he is revived, hale and hearty as ever.  But he isn’t the same man who died years ago.  What comes back is a self-absorbed narcissist who seems to have lost his soul somewhere in the transition.

And this gets us to the big problem with Chiller. In reading that paragraph you are probably thinking about dozens of interesting things a billionaire with no conscience or morals could do. Unless your list consists mostly of “lusting after stepsister” and “talking about himself” you’re going to be pretty disappointed.  But he does beat a woman and run over a priest, so you have that to look forward to.

Everyone tries hard to make it seem like Miles Creighton is evil incarnate, a soulless monstrosity who lets nothing stand in the way of his plan to control the company he was already given total control over once he came back from the dead.  But he comes across as less and evil and more, I don’t know, douchebaggy. Instead of American Psycho you get to watch that guy who cuts you off in traffic because he has somewhere to be conniving around his estate.

I could watch that by finding the nearest university.

The other big problem Chiller has is that it is a very dialogue heavy movie.  The rule of creating interesting fiction is that you show what is going on, don’t tell about it.  Somewhere this little axiom got lost and what you end up with is a movie where you watch people sit around and talk about what is happening.  You like exposition?  I hope so, because there are at least three instances where the whole movie grinds to halt so some ancillary characters can explain the things that have been happening off-screen, or what happened before the events in the movie began.  I’m not saying that you should rely on flashbacks or that having a dialogue heavy picture is a bad thing.  But when you have 5 minute scenes of Mrs. Creighton discussing things with Miles’ doctors, and then 5 minutes of talking with the Reverend, and then another 5 minutes of talking with the doctors (again) it drags down the whole thing.

Chiller has its moments, but for every second of something interesting happing onscreen there is a minute of people talking about what’s going on around them.  For the most part it’s not even entertaining by being bad.  It’s just…just…well I might as well come out and say it.

It just kind of boring

TODAY’S MENU: (things you can look forward to in this movie)

AARP members talking about the family business; Vehicular assault on a priest; Monotony; Synthesizer music complete with “something evil is happening” dissonance; Dialogue; One poorly-acted heart attack

SAINTS:

For some reason this movie was full of actors who reminded of other actors.

Beatrice Straight plays Miles’ mother Marion, and she does a serviceable job.  She gets more screen time than her murderous offspring, that’s for sure.  For a while I thought she was Mona from Who’s the Boss?

Paul Sorvino plays Reverend Penny, who seems to a reverend to Marion Creighton only.  He lives in a large house with a housekeeper, and for all the world reminded me of Tom Bosley playing Father Dowling.

Jill Scholein plays Stacy, Marion’s step-daughter.  She doesn’t do much but stand around looking innocent.  She looks like Winnie from The Wonder Years

Dick O’Neil plays Clarence Beeson, a close friend of Marion and her late husband.  Clarence was appointed to run the company awaiting Miles’ eventual resurrection. From what everyone says he was doing a crackerjack job, but Miles fires him anyway.  Nice guys finish last, Clarence.  (Note: Clarence didn’t really remind me of anyone.  Better luck next time, Clarence!)

SINNERS

Michael Beck plays Miles Creighton, our only real villain.  He plays the part well, complete with extra smarm and a leer that makes you want to choke the life out of him.  Somehow he avoids moving into stereotype territory despite the script’s continued efforts to make Miles look like a big crybaby.

THINGS THAT MADE STIKY GO “WHA…?”

This isn’t even Wes Craven’s first movie!  He’d already established himself as talented director with The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Swamp Thing. What’s the excuse Wes?  Did you need the money that badly?

They ripped off the title appearance from The Thing (1982).  It’s the exact same effect.

The people put in the cryogenic tanks are wrapped in plain old aluminum foil.  To keep out freezer burn?

Are zippered cardigans common work attire for doctors in major urban hospitals?

After being brought back to life, Miles looks like Ziggy Stardust in close-ups.

It takes 35 minutes for the plot to get moving and Miles to wake up.  And remember, that’s in a T.V. movie without commercials.

The peephole Miles uses to spy on Stacey wasn’t concealed at all.  It was the size of a 50 cent piece on a plain bright yellow wall in direct light.  How could Stacy not see that?

(SPOILER DANGER!!!)

After having his heart attack, nobody really talks about Clarence anymore.  I’m left to assume that his body was still sitting in the stairwell at the corporate office, which is apparently never used or cleaned.

THE BENEDICTION

When it comes to cut-rate Wes Craven movies the hobos agree.  Stick with Shocker. We give Chiller a charitable donation of two hobos.

THE SERMON

From horror-comedy to anthology.  I guess we’re getting some of the old stalwarts out of the way early on here at the Mission.

Trick ‘r Treat has probably one of the saddest little movie stories that I know of.  This Little Engine That Could was supposed to be released theatrically way back around Halloween of 2007, but for some unknown reason Warner Brothers decided to shelve the whole thing.  So the movie went to cinematic limbo, sitting on a shelf somewhere and collecting dust before another year had passed and then…nothing.  Still no wide release to masses clamoring for a Halloween movie that didn’t involve crude marionettes.  It isn’t until the Halloween season of 2009 the movie is sent forth amid a great deal of pre-release buzz.

On DVD.

Don’t get me wrong, the whole direct-to-video market isn’t what it used to be, and that is a good thing.  Still, taking a movie that could well become a holiday classic and to tossing it out on DVD with little fanfare meant that most, myself included, figured the whole thing was a waste of valuable time and effort.  Just another direct-to-video horror movie made be fan boys and possessing little in the way creativity or competence.

Then the reviews, mostly positive, came in.  Many were hailing this movie as a return to old-school horror (a phrase seriously over-abused as of late) or as a throwback to movies that were actually intense and scary without relying on the torture of major characters in the film.

Trick ‘r Treat lives up to such lofty praise.  It is well acted, well scripted, and well directed.  More importantly, this movie isn’t derivative or obsessed with paying “homage” to the classics by constantly referencing them. It is, in fact, one of the most ambitious and creative horror movies I have seen made in the last several years.

This isn’t to say that it is a perfect movie.  There are moments, particularly towards the end, where the whole movie tends to run out of gas.  Also, the anthology format causes the four main stories to feel sort of underdeveloped.  There simply isn’t enough time to flesh out the stories and characters.  In most anthologies this isn’t so bad, because the characters are mostly two-dimensional and the stories simply can’t hold up for long periods of time.  But writer/director Michael Dougherty has come up with four stories which are all incredibly interesting, and having them truncated to fit into one movie means that I felt like I missed out on something.

To quote Dr. H.S. Thompson: Let’s get down to brass tacks.

Trick ‘r Treat is masterfully directed, and there are plenty of scares and moments of dread throughout the film.  Very few of these moments rely on the old standby of quick-cuts and loud noises, meaning that Dougherty has had to build tension and make us care about what happens to the characters in a very short amount of time.  He handles this responsibility masterfully, setting up multiple set pieces where the fear isn’t in the startles but in the slow, mounting feeling of things just don’t seem right.

The effects turned out very good.  While there is some gore for those who want it, Dougherty has followed in the footsteps of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and applied the principle of “less is more” when it comes to deciding what to show.  The music is also chosen to fit the mood, and for the most part stays away from more contemporary soundtrack techniques such as borrowing songs from major label bands.  In fact, the one example of the movie turning into a short little music video actually caught my attention because it was straying from the pattern.

In the end, it is these small moments of inconsistency that bring the whole movie down a notch.  The endings that feel rushed, the soundtrack inconsistency, the constantly shifting timeline, all of these little problems add up over the course of the film, and I have to admit that I was not as infatuated with the movie at the end as I was in the beginning.

Don’t take this to mean that Trick r Treat isn’t worth your time.  I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and think that any fan of b-movies or of horror would likely do the same.  Even out of season this movie holds up.

One last note before we get to the Saints & Sinners: This has got to be the most intricately interwoven anthology I have ever seen.  You really get a sense that everything in this movie is happening at the same time.  Characters from one section will show up in others, sometimes in the background and sometimes as an important part of another story line.  There’s no central narrator or person who we keep coming back to that reminds us that we are not watching one feature-length film but are instead watching several shorter ones.  This required a lot more effort and again demonstrates Dougherty’s skill as a director.

SAINTS:

Dylan Baker plays Steven, a local high school principal who has some serious problems with the world and his paranoia.  Baker plays the character more comedic than calculating, and there are moments which actually made me laugh out loud.  The comedy remains muted but ever present, just the way it ought to be.

Whoever cast Brian Cox as the old man in the run down house should get a raise ASAP.  He plays the role as a tough-as-nails old coot who’s trying desperately to get away from something he doesn’t quite believe is real.  He is forced to carry his sequence almost entirely by himself.  It is to his credit that this segment is probably the most terrifying of the whole bunch.

SINNERS

The most notable villain in this piece is Sam, the child-like being seen moving throughout the background of the film.  In most segments he is seen in passing or in the background, picking up dead things and stuffing them in his pillowcase candy sack.  The murderous little creature and his burlap-masked head is genuinely unsettling and again, a creative take on your standard Halloween killer.

THINGS THAT MADE STIKY GO “WHA…?”

The movie’s use of a reverse timeline occasionally makes things hard to follow.  It’s much easier the second time through when you can start placing the order of events

Why isn’t the whole movie devoted to Steven and his little family?

The whole movie takes place over the course of one night.  The only daylight in the entire movie is shown via flashback.

Only rarely do characters do something stupid, but when they do it is very stupid

The town has what is quite possibly the greatest Halloween party I’ve sever seen.  My kingdom for a celebration like that around here.

How many murders do the police have to file away in this town?  Doesn’t anybody ever get suspicious?  Doesn’t anybody notice that people are dying left and right every Halloween?  In fact, I don’t recall seeing any cops during the entire film.

THE BENEDICTION

I’m normally not a fan of anthology horror, but this movie really is a throwback to an earlier age.  It was nice to see someone still plugging away at horror and not turning into a music video.  If only there had been just a little more follow through, but I guess you can’t make your Halloween popcorn movie 3-4 hours long.  Looking around the room we see that Trick ‘r Treat managed to entertain 4 of the 5 surly hobos here tonight.  Not bad, folks.  Check this one out.

THE SERMON

Horror-Comedy is a sub genre under attack.  In the past decade the combination has led to some of the worst cinematic atrocities ever put on film.  It’s served as a cop out for every no-talent director’s wooden-casted-predictably-plotted-derivative-self-referential claptrap.  They look at the final copy of their creation and pass it along to the distributor in an exchange I would imagine happened like this.

STUDIO EXECUTIVE: You know MR. DIRECTOR, I don’t really think your movie meets the standard of quality that ABC Films and its viewers have come to expect.

MR. DIRECTOR: What do you mean?

SE:  Well, the acting is terrible.  Every line was spoken with the same emotion as someone ordering a #4 off the value menu.  And the plot, well the plot just goes nowhere.  Nothing anybody does in your entire movie makes any sense.  There are no less that three scenes that are shot-for-shot remakes of Friday the 13^th Part 5.

MD: No, no, you don’t get it.  See, I was being ironic when I was making that film.  It’s just like those old time B movies they used to show at the drive-in.  I’m not a hack; I was just paying homage to the brave auteurs that came before.  Cardboard cut-out characters and toilet humor are totally edgy and with it.  All the kids eat this type of exploitation up.

SE: Oh, I see.  I guess I just don’t get the kids these days.  I didn’t find it that funny, but if you say it’s a comedy I’ll take your word for it.  We’ll print 10,000 copies (pushes button on desk intercom) Sheila, have the ad people start finding more synonyms for “madcap.”

Don’t misunderstand: There are some occasional gems to be found.  After all, I not only own but regularly wear an Army of Darkness t-shirt. (Thanks brother-o-mine!)  The problem is that there are very few diamonds and they sit at the bottom of a very large and over stuffed septic tank.

Night of the Creeps is one of those diamonds.

The “creeps” of the movie is a bit of a double-entendre.  On one hand, the movie is about experimental alien slugs that infest the brains of the dead and turn them into zombies.  On the other hand it refers to the men of the Beta house, as stereotypical pack of college alpha-males led by the fluffed blonde head of the “the Bradster.”

The biggest reason for this movie’s cult status, in my opinion, is the amount of talent involved.  All the principle actors are excellent in their roles and react to the growing menace in ways that are actually believable.  Director Fred Dekker mixes the horror elements and the comedy with a deft hand, preventing the movie from becoming Animal House with Zombies and maintaining its individuality.

So the $64,000 question remains: how much horror and how much comedy?

I personally found this movie to be very funny, but not in a laugh-out-loud way.  Most of the jokes are small, and treated like every other part of the dialogue.  There are very, very few moments where you get the idea the characters were telegraphing the comedy.  The biggest pitfall for many of these movies is the emphasis they put on the jokes.  You’ll have a scene and then a character will do something or say something and you get the idea that if it was up to the director there would be big red letters flashing across the screen reading “THIS IS A JOKE.  LAUGH NOW, AUDIENCE.  LAUGH AT OUR JOKE.”  Instead, Dekker allows the actors to throw away lines and for some reason, this makes it much funnier to me.

As far as the horror goes, this isn’t a movie that is going to keep you up after the credits role.  The effects are pretty good for a movie of this caliber (there are times when the rubber masks are painfully evident) but there are still plenty of exploding heads and zombies and the charring of corpses.  If you’re looking for a movie to terrify yourself this probably isn’t the best.  If you’re looking for an entertaining movie you can share with your friends I can think of none better.

SAINTS:

Tom Atkins plays Detective Ray Cameron.  Cameron is a man who is haunted by the past, but unlike most angsty detectives he has a pretty good reason to be.  It’s hard to imagine anyone but Atkins in this role and it remains one of my favorite horror movie performances to date.

Jason Lively and Steve Marshall are both great a male protagonists Chris and J.C.  These guys have an excellent on-screen chemistry and you really get the sense that they’ve been friends for years. Chris in particular is responsible for a lot of the movie’s subtle humor and helps anchor the comedic side of the film.

Jill Whitlow is also very good as our female lead, Cynthia.  She gives an air of the helpless female that is common in many of these movies, but it’s subtle and not overly played.  Again, her reactions to most of the events seem dead-on (no pun intended).  Plus, she turns out to be very handy with a flamethrower.

SINNERS

The brain slugs are wicked little creatures.  They jump in your mouth and eat their way to your brain.  The effects on the little buggers are done pretty well too,

Allan Kayser plays the Bradster, one of the great 80s villains.  All the men of Beta house are played to archetypical perfection as beer swilling frat boys, but “The Bradster” takes the cake.  This isn’t to say that he’s a one-dimensional character.  He’s definitely rich, and a jock, but he’s not stupid.  And while he’s a jerk, he’s not so big of one that you don’t feel kind of bad for him when he gets his inevitable comeuppance.

Zombie Axe Murderer.  Did I forget to mention this guy?  He’s been dead for 30 years or so but he comes back thanks to the brain slugs, axe in hand.

THINGS THAT MADE STIKY GO “WHA…?”

It took 24 years (24 YEARS!) to get this movie out on DVD

Director Fred Dekker also made the classic Monster Squad, and some episodes of Tales From the Crypt, but hasn’t made another horror movie since. WHY NOT?

I’m going to start answering my phone the same way Detective Cameron does.  “Cameron. Thrill me.”

THE BENEDICTION

Sorry Slither, but for my money this is the best slug-based zombie movie out there.  If you haven’t seen it yet you need to.  If you have seen it, go back and revisit it.  Checking the collection plate, we find that this movie gets the approval of no less than 5 surly hobos.  Way to go, Creeps.

Because at the B-Movie Mission, anything can be put down for the night.