horror

DVD/Stream of the Week: BORGMAN – witty and non-gory horror for adults

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BORGMAN
BORGMAN

Technically, the Dutch thriller Borgman is a horror film, but it’s horror for adults, without the gore and with lots of wit.  The shock doesn’t come from monsters unexpectedly lurching out of nowhere.  The entertainment comes from the OMG moments of the “don’t ask the weird guy into your house!” and “don’t let the sinister guys watch your kids!” variety.

The setting is the architecturally striking and well-tended home of an affluent Dutch family and their Danish nanny.  The husband is an aggro corporate schemer who is a real scumbag – selfish, racist and chauvinistic, with the capacity for a violent rage.  His wife Marina is repressed and neurotic.  But they are highly functional until a homeless guy, Camiel Borgman, happens by and circumstances compel them to put him up.   Borgman feels entitled to more and more outrageous impositions – and soon it’s apparent that he’s even more sinister than he is obnoxious.

What if Charles Manson wasn’t a drug addled hoodlum and instead used his deranged charisma with remarkable skill?    Borgman leads a crew of normal looking but murderous henchmen, who operate with the ruthless efficiency of Navy Seals.   (Watch for the scar near the younger woman’s shoulder-blade.)  Vaguely gifted with mind control, he can apparently create dreams by squatting naked gargoyle-like above Marina while she slumbers with her husband.  There is violence aplenty, but it tends to come through a bonk on the head or some poison in a glass.

Dark comedy stems from the matter-of-factness of the murders and body disposal (as in tossing corpses into a lake and then diving in for a relaxing swim).  Every once in a while, there’s a hilariously sinister moment, like the supremely random appearance of some whippets that seem more like hellhounds.

The acting is uniformly excellent, including the kids, but Jan Bijvoet as Borgman and Hadewych Minis as Marina are stellar.

Some questions are never answered (who are those three guys at the beginning and why are they hunting the homeless guys?).   Is this a cult or aliens or what?  The audience needs to accept some ambiguity. But the overall story arc is clear – no good is going to come of these people once they meet Camiel Borgman and his friends.

There is a subtext here: is this family so bourgeois that it deserves its fate? Fortunately, this subtext isn’t as in-your-face as in some recent self-loathing Eurocrap like Happy Days or Finsterworld, so it’s not at all off-putting. But Borgman can be enjoyed without going there at all.

Borgman is superbly written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam, a 62-year-old Dutch actor with only a handful of writing and directing credits.

I don’t often recommend a horror movie, but I’m all in on Borgman.  Take it from me – you haven’t seen this movie before, and it’s endlessly entertaining.    Borgman is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

THE TINGLER: Halloween fright from the 50s

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Vincent Price in THE TINGLER
Vincent Price in THE TINGLER

On Halloween, Turner Classic Movies is bringing us a campy Vincent Price horror classic from 1959, The Tingler.  It has a scary premise – a parasite embedding itself in people’s spine and feeding on them –  unaware until they feel a tingle AND THEN IT MAY BE TOO LATE!  When finally revealed, the grown parasite is VERY scary-looking.  Conveniently, the infested can weaken the parasite by screaming.  Horror schlockmeister William Castle reportedly installed buzzers in the backs of some theater seats, so some audience members would get an actual tingle in the spine at the scariest moments.  In the trailer below, Castle preps his audiences to scream if they feel a tingle.  It’s a cult classic.

Spider Baby: as Chaney’s horror career ended, Sid Haig’s was born

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Lon Chaney, Jr. in SPIDER BABY
Lon Chaney, Jr. in SPIDER BABY

There’s a cult classic coming up this Friday night (or very early Saturday morning) on Turner Classic Movies.  In the 1968 Spider Baby, a family of inbred ghouls is tended by a kind and rational caretaker (Lon Chaney, Jr.) until some greedy relatives and their shyster invade their spooky Victorian mansion and become cannibalized.  Spider Baby was reportedly made for only $65,000 – and it shows.  There’s the clunky and explicitly expositional beginning and ending narration and a TV sitcom look and feel.  But no 1960s TV show featured a daughter kissing her skeleton father goodnight, along with cretinous uncle and aunts in the basement and negligee-clad cannibals.

Spider Baby was filmed in 1964, but was caught up in bankruptcy proceedings and not released until 1968. This explains the offensive black character, which might have passed as regrettably mainstream in the early 60s, but must have seemed odd to the more racially conscious audiences in 1968.

Chaney has fun with playing a normal human among the monsters, and there’s a sly reference to The Wolfman at the dinner table.

As Chaney’s horror career ended, Sid Haig’s was just beginning.  Haig, in just his second feature, played a sex-craved Igor type.  He now has over 130 screen credits, including character roles in Emperor of the North and Jackie Brown and lots of TV work.  But Haig is most well-known for his horror, and it’s hard to top his portrayal of Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses.  Yikes.

Spider Baby is also known as The Maddest Story Ever Told, The Liver Eaters, Cannibal Orgy and various combinations of those titles.  Spider Baby has played on Turner Classic Movies before and is available streaming from Amazon, Vudu and Xbox Video.

Sid Haig in SPIDER BABY
Sid Haig in SPIDER BABY

Witching and Bitching: witty comment on mysogyny inside a rockin’ horror spoof

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WITCHING AND BITCHING
WITCHING AND BITCHING

The rockin’ Witching and Bitching (Las brujas de Zugarramurdi), by Spanish cult director Alex de la Iglesia, features a gang of robbers – one is dressed as a silver Jesus on the cross and another as a Green Army Guy – on the lam rocketing into an occult nightmare.  They run smack dab into a coven of witches – the full-out Macbeth-stir-the-cauldron kind of witches.  This film has the feel of an early Almodovar madcap comedy – if Almodovar were into goth horror. It’s all rapid-pulsed fun – and surprisingly smart.

The underlying theme is misogyny.  The male characters grouse about the stereotypical complaints about women – all while themselves exemplifying the worst of the stereotypical male flaws.  For example, one guy complains that his ex won’t consent to joint custody on the grounds of his irresponsibility – yet he brings their seven-year-old along on an armed robbery.  One underlying joke is that the men see women as bitches, but it’s the men who spend the whole movie bitching.  Another is that the men become trapped by REAL witches whose ball busting far exceeds the men’s most negative misogynistic fantasies.

These Spanish actors are wonderful, including the great Carmen Maura (Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Volver) and appropriately named hottie Carolina Bang. They’re very adept at the deadpan delivery of lines like this:

Driver: This village is damned. They hold witches sabbaths.
Boy: What’s that?
Robber: Like a kegger but medieval.

De la Iglesia maintains a deliciously frantic pace throughout.  The final orgiastic ritual goes on a long time but maintains audience engagement.

This was the first de la Iglesia movie that I’d seen, but I’m definitely going to check out more of his work.  Speaking of which, he nicely sets up a sequel.  But go ahead and watch Witching and Bitching now – streaming in Amazon Instant, iTunes and Xbox Video.

DVD/Stream of the Week: The Conjuring

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THE CONJURING

Just right for Halloween week, the satisfying shocker The Conjuring begins in a familiar way. In 1971, a couple (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) moves into an old, isolated farmhouse with their five daughters. The youngest kid finds a creepy old music box, the dog refuses to come inside the house, all the clocks stop at 3:07 AM, the house is always chilly and there’s a boarded-up cellar. If you’ve ever seen a scary movie, you know that THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED. Soon, the family desperately seeks the help of husband and wife ghostbusters (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson).

Interestingly, the story is based on a real occurrence. The real ghost experts soon afterward took on the notorious house in Amityville, Long Island.

What makes The Conjuring work so well? First, the performances of Vera Farmiga and Lili Taylor elevate the material. Each is gifted with the capacity to mix passion, inner strength and fragility.

Director James Wan superbly paces the action, letting our sense of dread build and build until we jump in our seats. He uses a handheld (but not jumpy) camera to provide cool angles and a point of view that helps us relate to the characters.

And there is no gore. There are a few scary images, but The Conjuring relies on good, old-fashioned surprises and our discomfort with the occult to supply the fright.

The Conjuring is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and other VOD providers.

Grabbers: coulda been a contender

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GRABBERS

In the Irish horror comedy Grabbers, an isolated Irish island is attacked by tentacled, bloodsucking alien space monsters.  Here’s the inventive device that could have resulted in a cult classic – it turns out that alcohol is toxic to the monsters, so the residents can survive as long as they keep a high enough level of alcohol in their bloodstreams.  Pretty funny, right?  I could imagine the colorful villagers in Waking Ned Devine helping each other to stay drunk, but not too drunk.

Unfortunately, the bit about the effects of alcohol doesn’t appear until halfway through, and the real focus in on the romantic conflict between the pretty and highly professional cop from Dublin and the drunken local Garda – an obvious story that we’ve seen in every bad romantic comedy.  What we’re left with is a low-budget horror flick with a trite “Will they get together?” thread.  Too bad.

Grabbers is available streaming from Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, GooglePlay and other VOD sources.

The Conjuring: satisfying shocker

by
THE CONJURING

The satisfying shocker The Conjuring begins in a familiar way.  In 1971, a couple (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) moves into an old, isolated farmhouse with their five daughters.  The youngest kid finds a creepy old music box, the dog refuses to come inside the house, all the clocks stop at 3:07 AM, the house is always chilly and there’s a boarded-up cellar.  If you’ve ever seen a scary movie, you know that THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED.  Soon, the family desperately seeks the help of husband and wife ghostbusters (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson).

Interestingly, the story is based on a real occurrence.  The real ghost experts  soon afterward took on the notorious house in Amityville, Long Island.

What makes The Conjuring work so well?  First, the performances of Vera Farmiga and Lili Taylor elevate the material.  Each is gifted with the capacity to mix passion, inner strength and fragility.

Director James Wan superbly paces the action, letting our sense of dread build and build until we jump in our seats.  He uses a handheld (but not jumpy) camera to provide cool angles and a point of view that helps us relate to the characters.

And there is no gore.  There are a few scary images, but The Conjuring relies on good, old-fashioned surprises and our discomfort with the occult to supply the fright.

Berberian Sound Studio: clever – yes, thrilling – no

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Toby Jones in BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

Here’s an inventive setting for a psychological thriller – the sound studio where the cheesy Italian horror movies of the 1970s were dubbed and mixed.  Everyone comes to work, put on headphones and screams into a mic.  Naturally, there’s plenty of droll humor, like when the two sound techs (named Massimo and Massimo) mimic the sound of stabbing human bodies by plunging butcher knives into watermelons.

A British sound engineer (Toby Jones) down on his luck, arrives for a gig and is horrified to discover that he’s working on a gory exploitation movie.  His English reserve is no match for either his loud and volatile Italian coworkers or the impenetrable Italian business bureaucracy.  Slowly (and this film is not quick-paced), he begins to crack.

This is not the kind of horror film with lots of on-screen gore.  We only see the opening credits and one brief glimpse at the movie that is being dubbed. We hear the spinechilling screams and the scary sound effects while we are watching bored techies with headphones.  The suspense is in the watching the Jones character teeter on the brink of unraveling.

Berberian Sound Studio is getting some rapturous critical praise that just seems like hyperventilating to me.  It contains some clever parts, but there’s just not enough thrill there for a thriller.  Toby Jones’ spiral into madness in the last 25 minutes is very good, but by that time I was struggling to stay awake.

Berberian Sound Studio is enjoying a brief theatrical release and is avaiable streaming from Amazon and other VOD purveyors.

DVD /Stream of the Week: Warm Bodies

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Take the zombie version of Romeo and Juliet meets Beauty and the Beast and we have the charmingly funny Warm Bodies.  When marauding zombies corner some human teens, a hunky teen zombie is smitten by a saucy live girl (Teresa Palmer), saves her from his comrades and shambles her off to his lair.  After he saves her life a few times, she begins to look past his deadness.  But her people want to shoot him in the head, and his people want to feast on her organs, so there’s that.

Nicholas Hoult, all grown up from his role as the kid in About a Boy, plays the zombie.   Although he can only grunt to the zombies and live humans, the audience hears him narrating his thoughts.  It’s normal for any besotted guy to warn himself, “Don’t be creepy! Don’t be creepy!”, but it’s very funny when the guy is dead and looks dead.

Director Jonathan Levine’s (50/50) screenplay is adapted from Isaac Marion’s novel, and it hits all the right notes.  It’s the story of a really nice boy trying to get a girl to like him, and it’s just hard for her to get past the fact that he ate her boyfriend’s brains.

Rob Corddray is excellent as Hoult’s zombie best friend and, hey, John Malkovich is in this movie, too.  I’ve included Warm Bodies in my list of Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.  Warm Bodies is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and sreaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and other VOD outlets.

Warm Bodies: the zombie version of Romeo and Juliet meets Beauty and the Beast

by

Take the zombie version of Romeo and Juliet meets Beauty and the Beast and we have the charmingly funny Warm Bodies.  When marauding zombies corner some human teens, a hunky teen zombie is smitten by a saucy live girl (Teresa Palmer), saves her from his comrades and shambles her off to his lair.  After he saves her life a few times, she begins to look past his deadness.  But her people want to shoot him in the head, and his people want to feast on her organs, so there’s that.

Nicholas Hoult, all grown up from his role as the kid in About a Boy, plays the zombie.   Although he can only grunt to the zombies and live humans, the audience hears him narrating his thoughts.  It’s normal for any besotted guy to warn himself, “Don’t be creepy! Don’t be creepy!”, but it’s very funny when the guy is dead and looks dead.

Director Jonathan Levine’s (50/50) screenplay is adapted from Isaac Marion’s novel, and it hits all the right notes.  It’s the story of a really nice boy trying to get a girl to like him, and it’s just hard for her to get past the fact that he ate her boyfriend’s brains.

Rob Corddray is excellent as Hoult’s zombie best friend and, hey, John Malkovich is in this movie, too.  I’m going to include Warm Bodies in my upcoming list of Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.