Monster Capsules: BIG ASS SPIDER, WAKE WOOD, WOMAN IN BLACK, DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VALLEY OF GWANGI

Director Mike Mendez is fast becoming a horror icon and Big Ass, a sometimes not wince-inducing monster movie, is proof he knows how to keep a lumbering low budget comedy-monster genre film fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) is the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that proves even to the military he's the best man for the job when a top secret DNA experiment spider escapes inside a hospital, melts some faces with its acid venom spray, then grows to titanic proportions and climbs a downtown L.A. office building, with a hottie lieutenant webbed up inside and the eggs about to hatch.  Playing a kind of PG version of Ronnie the mall cop played by Seth Rogen in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies'"Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies monster regulations by showing the full creature within the first few minutes, and the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the ear canals, it's a film that will make a nice surprise if and when it shows up on the Syfy channel or Netflix streaming and you catch it kind of accidentally at first as background and then get casually sucked in. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with Grunberg at first. But eventually his moxy pays off and he gets to kiss the hottie Lieutenant (Clare Kramer). As his eager "Kato or Robin," Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña in Observe and Report coupled with Cheech Marin. That's not a put-down, Peña is so hilarious in Observe and Report he feels genuinely dangerous. If only Pauline Kael were alive to praise him. She's probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider. It lacks that Observe's disturbing deadpan ease with darkness, but when you can't handle serious drama or any sense of something being at stake... like on a Tuesday night... or a Saturday afternoon... pounce!

Hammer is back in business! They produced this keen little British chiller and you can tell, you can read by its compelling Godsend-ish 'family grief bringing back a child' horror meets The Wicker Man pagan rural secret genre coupled with the terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason genre, ala that girl in the basement of Night of the Living Dead that this is a film made by horror fans for horror fans. Hell, it's Hammer! The story involves a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moving his family to the small rural England town of the title. When his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. This is too good to be true for the grief-stricken mother (Dublin-born Eva Barthistle - who was also in the similar The Children two years earlier) and naturally neither she or the kid want to play by town rules and go back in the ground when time's up. Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her yellow raincoat appearing in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish terror. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some gory deaths, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!

Hammer does it again! They are really on a second chance roll and despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail, it's never stuffy and when all told really rather ripping.  Daniel Radcliffe is surprisingly solid, restrained without being dull, as a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to settle the estate and inventory of a dark decaying mansion out in the boonies. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a child abducting sicko enacting an ancient curse, like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit, replete with tight-lipped terrified locals. Surprisingly solid, effective little chiller story with nice punchy ending, and if the story follows a too familiar pattern = equal parts J-Horror / Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents, since it's by Hammer so all the suspicious locals and all that has a nice harkening back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get the cold shoulder from the same frightened innkeepers.

 The sense of pacing is superb and we get nice and chilled just from Radcliffe running around the dark mansion with his drippy candle, the sort of thing I generally find tedious unless the person exploring the dark house is Jane Birkin in Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye so I doubted this was going to be any good until it showed up on Showtime and man was I wrong. Director James Watkins shows he's got the goods and that the chilling power of Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke. He's definitely not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and proves himself a force on the scene poised to, if not become the next Neil Marshall, at least become the next Terence Fisher! Hammer don't hurt him!

Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always on point, such as this entry in the Hammer Dracula series, which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terribly washed out non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc and I never got more than five minutes in before running away in terror of being bored (I cannot handle washed out colors -- England's skies are dreary enough). Well, this blu-ray is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out aspect that turns out to be the problem. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely taking up residence at Dracula's castle for the night while a sinister servant slowly uses the blood of one of them to the count back to life. Christopher Lee seems to resent having to wear fangs again and moments border on ridiculous, ala the ability to make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films over on Divinorum Psychonauticus), and here's another thing I never understood: if you want to keep vamps away, just eat garlic! Son't hang it in garlands so some hypnotized maid can come remove it. It makes no sense when you can just poison his water supply directly, so to speak.


Oh well, the blu-ray is delicious with rich sickly gold yellows and a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle, which is fortunate as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds and never returning, while Darwin chuckles from on high and we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last detail involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. It's still pretty cool, though, and I remembered that scene from my childhood (and mixing it up in my mind with Horror Express) but the cracked ice finale is rushed and beyond ridiculous. It's not even cold out and here's this convenient 'frozen pond' so close to the castle it makes no architectural sense. If that sort of thing doesn't bother you, and you don't mind watching actors feeling uncomfortably under-directed, as if their marks had been drawn in wind, well enjoy Drac's good taste in brides; he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley and we all benefit.

Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels why too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys led by James Franciscus stumbling onto a desert paradise hidden from man for aeons that looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert where they just were, with by no sort of ecosystem able to nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus, purple here, for reasons I'm sure exist. I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still know more on the subject than the alleged paleontologist in this film, who at one point shouts "A Styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to talk. At least he knows to get out of the sun to watch the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down.


No disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up - and here they're monochrome purple colors make them look like plastic kid's toys,, even if those toys come to brilliant slithering life under Harryhausen's patient hand. The man's no slouch, he even animates the eohippus, when a movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk and overlaid.


So yeah, I tried to love it as long as I can remember, but I can't dig GWANGI and I finally figured out why. It's not just that I hate children in monster movies, especially the burdensome cliche'd Mexican kid, one peso senor, that all monster movies seem to think settings in Mexico, Italy, or Spain, Brazil or Portugal require. And that all that sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, no, it's because there's this unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to hunt this poor little horse down for the public's amusement, and to grab the still surviving beasts for public display thus proving the point that man destroys everything he touches. Harryhausen's famous for getting us to care about his monsters but that can backfire. I still can't bear to watch Twenty Million Miles to Earth. And like that film, our abused creature even has to battle another abused creature, in this case an elephant, also Harryhausen-animated. I have the same problem with Hatari! My top ten favorite movies of all time are at least 60% Hawks, but I can't abide that film's obliviously callous approach to animals and the icky triumph of Red Buttons in getting the girl through methods most boys abandon before they even get a first date. Hawks, you're sending the wrong message to the children!


Big Ass Spiders and mantises however never manage to earn human sympathy, and for that I am truly grateful, a realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead look over towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955--above) like a man who finally realizes what matters in life, like a boy who thinks like an arachnid in love... with Mara Corday.

(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)