"Take any fire, any earthquake, any major disaster, then wonder." - Plan Nine from Outer SpaceSummer's in its last dying gasp and thank God. I was working on a list here of something else... something more serious and sociologically important, like lesbianism, or 'The Incredible Dissolving Father' which is, as you know, my unfinished thesis capstonezzzzz for the course not taken. But instead... doesn't anyone remember laughter? And horror? Death's too short for lofty theses and lifestyles from which I am twicefold excluded and therefore fascinated by.
The horror-comedy hybrid on the other hand, is all-inclusive. Fear leavened with laughs is like whiskey and ginger ale, like campfires and a leavening quip after a scary urban legend. After all, by day we joke about the monsters that scare us at night. At least I do. Whatever the reason, it's global - and as old as time - and we deserve better than Haunted House 2 and Scary Movie III and V (I won't allow myself to see 'em - but you can on Netflix).Luckily, an array of options exists from all around the world, each with a mixture all its own of both elements. Some might be unintentionally funny, some are just 'witty' or 'stoner' horror/sci fi movies, not comedies (what I call 'fuzzy' - like John Dies at the End, Iron Sky, orCabin in the Woods- none of which are included here, for differing reasons), some are just unique unto themselves, maybe just wry or macabre. More obvious and acclaimed choices like the hilarious Re-Animator and touching Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, are also left out. But they're there, oh man. But you know this already. See them, and Cosmopolis. Then wonder.
OUT OF THE DARK
"Wui wan yeh" (1995) Dir. Stephen Chow
***1/2
***1/2
Lucky for America, we have most of the Stephen Chow oeuvre on Netflix Streaming (still need the great and hilarious Forbidden City Cop). Here's one I'd never seen before. A huge star in HK and Mainland China, here he's mostly unknown, partly because he's not Jackie Chan or Jet Li and his satire skewers a pop culture partially different than ours (albeit with plenty of crossover), but if you've seen any Asian horror movies in the last ten years -- Ringu, Ju-On, Pulse, Dark Water, Suicide Club, Tale of Two Sisters, Audition, A Chinese Ghost Story, etc. --and western films beloved of China, like The Professional and Evil Dead, you should get at least 80% of the jokes (though amazingly, it prefigures the entire J-Horror crossover boom here in the states (none of those films came out until years after). Chow stars as a crazy ghost hunter called to a towering HK apartment complex to exorcise the vengeful spirit of a couple's recently deceased mother. The daughter (the great Karen Mok) is bored and restless and finds the ghost chaser--with his long black coat, sunglasses and mysterious Chow Yun Fatty ways--intriguing. And soon she's showing up where he lives (a lunatic asylum) dressed like Natalie Portman in The Professional. He even lets her carry his houseplant, with its flower that acts as a diving rod, pointing in the direction of the spirits.
There's too much going on to name, but I particularly loved the juxtaposition of Chow's exorcist qualification biography of his childhood haunting experiences with a flashback montage trip as a child to the carnival, misinterpreting all the papier mache monsters as real (left); and when he tries to train the security force of the building to conquer their fears via games of hot potato with lit dynamite. And they'll need that training, because the spirit is not giving up, possessing random people and pursuing our hero and his coterie around the building with a chainsaw. In other words, its comedy and horror are both unsparing, and it had me laughing giddily from beginning to end (it's only 70 minutes long) and wiped away all my ensuing dread at 3 AM, the witching hour. (In Cantonese w/ English subtitles) See also: God of Cookery, Shaolin Soccer
New Zealand
HOUSEBOUND
HOUSEBOUND
(2014) Dir Gerard Johnstone
***
***
Who is Morgana O'Reilly, where did she come from and why do I have an enormous crush on her after seeing her sneer her way through a bravura turn as Kylie Bucknell, an under-house-arrest punk partier and a cross between DEAD FILES' physical medium Amy Allan and Nicky Marotta from TIMES SQUARE (1980)? Oh yeah, 'cuz she's badass. A bit of a self-absorbed bitch, but hey, who wouldn't be a bitch if stuck, ankle bracelet monitor-first, in a haunted house presided over by a sweet but nonstop babbling mum (Rima Te Wiata), mostly absentee stepdad, and bordered within and without by maniacs, ghostly visitors, and squirrel-skinning suss angus neighbor. Aided by a hometown security officer who's got the enviable job of being first responder when her ankle bracelet goes off (which it does frequently) df is the decent bloke who's perhaps smitten or just bored and fascinated by her crazy hot anger --luckily we're spared a romance with him or anyone else as the film chugs its way merrily through a Fosters six-pack of weird genre double twist expectations. I can't reveal more about the plot, as it veers off this way and that on it's way to a rainy rooftop climax, so just relax and let go as your genre expectations are fucked with but never in an over-obvious cheeky way... it's deadpan enough to work, funny enough to win you over, and weird/scary enough to keep you watching even when it lapses into that Kiwi quirkiness. Just keep your eyes on the cool, fearless Kylie who, among other things, isn't afraid to sneak into the suspected killer's house while he's asleep, in order to steal the bridgework right out of his mouth. As the kids there say, it's hardout sweet as! (See also: The Babadook)
Spain
WITCHING AND BITCHING
"Las brujas de Zugarramurdi" (2014) - Dir. Alex de la Iglesia
***1/2
***1/2
The great (like Chow, unjustly off the American mainstream radar), Alex de la Iglesia's ballsy 'comedy of the sexes' film bursts with mucho original ideas, carnal energy, wit, acumen, and Jungian archetypal initiation ritual mysticism. It's like a gender-reversed The Magic Flute if Mozart smoked meth and was married to a hot-tempered girl from Seville). Starring Hugo Silva as a stuggling divorced dad, driven past the point of his insanity by his hyper-intense and angry nurse ex-wife (Macarena Gómez), the story begins with a gone-awry pawn shop robbery--with son and fellow divorcees in tow--of a big box of pawned men's gold wedding bans --representing the epidemic of divorced, beaten-down-by-unrealistic-child support/alimony payments in Spain--hiding out in the wrong town on their way to the French border, where they wind up on the menu at a bizarre witches' sabbath, overseen by a three-generational female enclave: the older slightly senile, but always ready with her sharpened steel dentures, Maritxtu (Terele Pávez), the grand dame of the coven Graciana (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura), and the hot younger daughter Eva (Carolina Bang who, with her wild Kate McKinnon-style eyes and punk haircut, is the scary-sexy dynamo persona we all dream of. These witches leap through the air, crawl on the ceiling, and live on a steady diet of psychoactive toad secretions and cooked children. In short, they're so badass they make the witches in Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem seem like the ones in Bewitched... See it twice, to savor all the craziness (for it's very fast paced) and bask in its gleefully amoral madness and even-keeled celebration of woman's unholy power. Too bad about the tacky American title, though... and the poster art that makes it seem like a Disney movie. (more: Bitches' Sabbath) (In Spanish with English subtitles)
Ireland
GRABBERS
GRABBERS
(2012) Dir Jon Wright
***
***
South Korea
THE HOST
"Gwoemul" (2006) Dir. Bong Joon-Ho
***1/2
***1/2
Bong's a pretty solid storyteller, able to inject more satiric comedy into horrific circumstances in an organic flow than Shakespeare, Howard Hawks and Chaplin combined. So this monster movie encompasses a broad satire against America's containment, pollution and political policies down on the democratic capitalist side of the 49th parallel, a nail-biting endurance test as one brave but dysfunctional family try to escape a mass quarantine of all monster witnesses to rescue their young daughter/granddaughter before she dies of consumption, or is consumed by the weird mutant plesiosaurus-frog monster while hiding amidst the rotting corpses deep inside the monster's deep sewer stash (like an alligator, it spits them out for later consumption). It can be a rough transition between this resourceful girl's dwindling optimism and the dysfunctional strivings of her extended family unit battling through rain and American-controlled security and quarantine. The bronze medalist Olympic archery sister gets one last chance to hit the mark, the kindly gullible nearly-Cauldwell-esque bumpkin grandfather presumes he can bribe his way out of any scrape with money and a hangdog look; the brother who's 'been to college' which means his constant criticism of everyone else's decisions leaves him too busy for any right action, and the girl's dimwitted dad. Bong loves setting up our expectations for a 'giant monster' film and then skewing them, but he has a vision for mankind so dark and disturbing it almost rings true as stealth optimism. Time and again his heroes destroy themselves on the altar of a better future for their children... and in the process he gives the west a more satirically complete translation of SK's national mindset than we're perhaps emotionally prepared for. (In Korean with English subtitles; see also: Snowpiercer)
Chinatown (SF, California)
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA
(1986) Dir. John Carpenter
****
****
Released towards the end of sci fi's golden era, it took the small screen for Carpenter's satirical badass answer to Indiana Jones to find an audience. Initially bewildered, half-asleep kids watching cable on Saturday afternoons snapped out of their stupors in awe. Was this thing for real? Was it a comedy? We didn't really have the deadpan weird horror genre then. We loved the over-the-top Flash Gordon (1980) but didn't make the connection that it too had a tongue in cheek, nor did we have much access to the old matinee serials Indiana Jones was a tribute to. Now we know how to savor Carpenter's knack for deadpan Hawksian comic adventure, and a few of us even recognized it in Ghosts of Mars, and of course Escape from L.A. The Wayne to JC's Ford, Kurt Russell gets the deadpan flavor as blowhard trucker Jack Burton, who winds up embroiled in mystery, monsters, and magic around behind and under the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown with his buddy Wang (Dennis Dun) whose green eyed bride is abducted from the airport by a gang of junior Triad members, setting off a big battle of good vs. evil. Carpenter packs the film with an array of welcome familiar Asian-American face, like John Lone (as the tittering evil Lo Pan, both old man in wheelchair and ghostly Chinese demon) and the great Victor Wong is subtly hilarious as a white magic wizard herb expert who's been waiting for the big showdown a long time. But there's also a gorgeous green-eyed young creature, Kim Cattrall as intrepid reporter Gracie Law. Russell is hilarious, his chemistry with Gracie riveting (we all wanted an intrepid reporter girlfriend after this). I know nearly every line by heart.
Norway
DEAD SNOW: RED VS. DEAD
"Dod Sno" (2014) Dir. Tommy Wirkola
***
The Bride of Frankenstein of Nazi zombie horror movies, meaning an instance where the sequel's even better than the original, which has itself become something of a worldwide classic. And like Bride, it starts in the climax of the last one: Martin (Vegar Hoel), the final boy of the last film now has the the dreaded Colonel Herzog's (Ørjan Gamst) arm sewed onto him, and can raise the dead with it. So in this case he's resurrecting a bunch of Russian POWs executed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave, to go up against Herzog's crew (who've liberated an old Panzer tank from a nearby museum, making them the first of Europe's legion of undead Nazis to ever one). Marin is aided by three American nerds, 'the Zombie squad' who fly in to help out (causing the cast to all speak in convenient English --not dubbed, at least not here): Martin Starr, a familiar face to all comedy nerds (Party Down, Burning Love), Ingrid Haas and Jocelyn DeBoer, who I fell in love with on the spot, as a Star Wars nerd, the type who can have her pick of the San Diego comic-con but probably doesn't even realize it, which makes her even more inside the 'Goldilocks Zone.' And everyone plays it dead straight, as nature, science and Nordic tradition demands. Miss it at your own risk (see also: Troll Hunter)
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With Franco favorites Daniel White--delivering a typically great lite jazz / avant cacophony score--and Howard Vernon as the mayor, this still has director Jean Rollin's (posing as J.A. Lasar) usual mix of rural tranquility amidst flowers and castle ruins, fake blood, ennui-crippled actors and a French vibe where everyone seems to be under a love spell even when allegedly dragging each other off to be killed and blood drunk from. Sentiment is dragged up in the form of one of the soldiers taking the opportunity to reunite with the daughter offspring of his romance with a local girl (before his unit was killed by French resistance fighters and thrown in the local haunted lake.) This film gets a bad rap from even the Rollin/Franco contingent, but it's a great melancholy chablis blanc after the steak tartare and whiskey meal of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead as far as zombie Nazi movies. I like it better than most of Rollin's films, mainly because it's so very French, with a big shoulder shrug as if zombie horror movie conventions were no more to be listened to than an annoying American tourist. And now, thanks to a nice HD restoration, Max Monteillet's pastoral photography captures a note of lyrical pastoral reverie, particularly now that we can see inside the dark shadows that only come from narrow ancient architecture streets in early evening. There's very little dialogue, lots of White's macabrely contrapuntal piano, lounge themes, and silent passages where we can tune into the ambient nature of the French countryside, a locale where Nazi occupation is still fresh in the flashbackable minds of the elders, and nearly every woman in the village is young, gorgeous, and caught completely off guard when a zombie comes shambling into her backyard. Very French! And very French that it's so quietly amusing and gently life affirming the more it tries to be serious and horrific. In French with English subtitles.)
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France
ZOMBIE LAKE
"Le lac des morts vivants" (198) Dir. Jean Rollin
**
**
With Franco favorites Daniel White--delivering a typically great lite jazz / avant cacophony score--and Howard Vernon as the mayor, this still has director Jean Rollin's (posing as J.A. Lasar) usual mix of rural tranquility amidst flowers and castle ruins, fake blood, ennui-crippled actors and a French vibe where everyone seems to be under a love spell even when allegedly dragging each other off to be killed and blood drunk from. Sentiment is dragged up in the form of one of the soldiers taking the opportunity to reunite with the daughter offspring of his romance with a local girl (before his unit was killed by French resistance fighters and thrown in the local haunted lake.) This film gets a bad rap from even the Rollin/Franco contingent, but it's a great melancholy chablis blanc after the steak tartare and whiskey meal of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead as far as zombie Nazi movies. I like it better than most of Rollin's films, mainly because it's so very French, with a big shoulder shrug as if zombie horror movie conventions were no more to be listened to than an annoying American tourist. And now, thanks to a nice HD restoration, Max Monteillet's pastoral photography captures a note of lyrical pastoral reverie, particularly now that we can see inside the dark shadows that only come from narrow ancient architecture streets in early evening. There's very little dialogue, lots of White's macabrely contrapuntal piano, lounge themes, and silent passages where we can tune into the ambient nature of the French countryside, a locale where Nazi occupation is still fresh in the flashbackable minds of the elders, and nearly every woman in the village is young, gorgeous, and caught completely off guard when a zombie comes shambling into her backyard. Very French! And very French that it's so quietly amusing and gently life affirming the more it tries to be serious and horrific. In French with English subtitles.)
Barcelona, Spain
[REC] 3: GENESIS
"[Rec]³: Génesis" 2012 Dir. Paco Plaza
***
***
Hollywood, USA
INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS
(1973) Dir. Denis Sanders
**1/2
**1/2
Displaying kind of the reverse problem of Zombie Lake, Bee Girls' (AKA Graveyard Tramps) only real problem is its dreadful Gary Graver cinematography, which gives everything that amateur look of a man who cannot block shots correctly, light anything effectively, or do much more than keep things in focus (80% of the time). He was a busy man, though, working on six other exploitation films in 1973 alone, including Bummer, and The Clones. It could be there's a better negative somewhere but I doubt it. Who cares? Fuckin' love Anitra Ford, the Cronenberg-esque research center setting, the lucky break caught temporarily by the gay scientist (and the agent's relatively enlightened reaction to same) and the great buzzing soundtrack and jet black eyes. See also: Re-Animator.
Saskatchewan, Canada
WOLFCOP
(2014) Dir Lowell Dean
***
Shot in the wild woolly wilderness towns of Sasketchewan, this weird fusion of lupine weirdness, copious drinking, cop car weaponizing to rock montage music and a hot bitch bartender who visits Wolfcop in his full moon holding cell wearing a sexy red riding hood cape and bearing a basket of candles, erotic lotions, and fine Canadian whiskey. There's even room for old lady Satanists, a good lady cop, and duplicitous heshers. Is it kind of tawdry around the edges? Sure, but how many films are set and shot way up in the provinces, Canada's version of Alaska? Nice to know they have convenience store robbing thugs up there, too. It's aboot more than just dumb Troma snark or Japanese arterial spray comedy, so earns its spot herein. (See also: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil)***
A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
2014 Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
***1/2
***1/2
This unique crowd-pleaser isn't funny haha, but funny in that it's like something Tom Wait might make if he was an Iranian girl drinking Skid Row dry in Touch of Evil. A Persian language film rich with Jarmusch interconnectivity, it connects indirectly with two druggy black and white NYC art movies from the 90s, Nadja and Ferrara's The Addiction. (See: Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City)And despite the cultural differences (different coast, decade, language) the similarities to those two films are striking, especially in the importance of alternative music on the soundtrack. Like Nadja made great use of Portishead, and Addiction made great use of Cypress Hill, Girl makes great use of White Lines, and is way better than Jarmusch's same year similarly music-guided vamp film Only Lovers Left Alive. Either way, Persian language horror films are so rare this had to be included. Set in "Bad City," actually the graveyards and oil derricks of Bakersfield, CA., "pumping up money" as Hank Quinlan would say, or "blood" as vampire Plainview would say. As "The Girl," Sheila Vand guzzles a coke-dealing thug and a junky dad who lets his sons support his habit, and we cheer their gruesome demise by a specter of feminist vengeance wrapped in her black cape hijab like Dracula's cape. I love that she waits until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out, she barely speaks, but it recalls the druggy blood-harvesting of Dark Angel). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, her playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way, especially into her touching romance with the semi-cool lead boy. (In Persian with English subtitles)