January 2014

Mountain Monsters (2012)

It’s not a movie, but if you’re lucky enough to have Channel 201, Destination America, you must watch this incredible show.

Apparently the hills of West Virginia are teeming with all manner of cryptozoological fauna, including the Moth Man, the Grass Man, wolf men, dog men, devil dogs, wampus beasts, and every distant relative of Bigfoot known to mankind.

So who you gonna call? John “Trapper” Tice and his AIMS (Appalachian Investigators of Mysterious Sightings) team, that’s who!

Trapper and his boys like nothing more than an excuse to go crashing through the woods at night in search of legendary beasts spotted by their hillbilly brethren.

Besides Trapper, there’s Jeff, who’s in charge of research. In other words, he has a laptop and knows how to use it. Willy and Wild Bill build all sorts of outlandish traps, pits, and snares, in hopes of capturing a heretofore unknown specimen. They’ve never succeeded, but by god, it ain’t for lack of trying!

Huckleberry (Woooot! Team Huckleberry!) is a hunter and tracker with a ready supply of guns, ammo, and thermal-imaging gear. (“Wait! There’s something there! *pause* Now it’s gone!”)

And then there’s Buck, the fat-guy comic relief, who once locked eyes with the Moth Man himself—and fell over hypnotized! On camera! At least once per episode, Buck will gaze in wonder at sketchy video evidence of their mythical quarry (usually a misshapen shadow or tree branch that moved) and exclaim, “That thing’s huge!”

Needless to say, AIMS has never brought home any appreciable evidence of wolf men, aliens, blue devils, or thunderbirds. But I sleep safely at night knowing that these fearless investigators… are really, really far away across the country and unlikely to mistake me for the Beast of Bray Road or the bloodsucking Devil Dog of Logan County and fill my hide with buckshot.

Mountain Monsters is a hoot and it’s must-see TV. It’s also been renewed for a second season!

Blood Runs Cold (2011)

Based on the description, I thought this might be some annoyingly clever musical crossover, since its rather featureless lead character Winona (Hanna Oldenburg) is supposedly a successful pop singer.

To my relief, she doesn’t sing a note. She’s far too busy trying to elude the zombie-cannibal-miner-hillbilly freak that’s intent on having her over for a snack (if you know what I mean).

Blood Runs Cold is filmed somewhere near Stockholm, pretending to be North Carolina—which also accounts for the mercurial accents on display.

Winona (not a Judd) must four-wheel her way through several miles of frozen tundra to a remote house near her hometown that has been rented by her manager.

Note: If this guy was my manager, and he stuck me way-the-hell-out in some snowbound hick town without my entourage, he’d soon be nut-punched.

Winona (not a Judd) finds her crummy dump of a house, settles in and drives to a nearby tavern where she stumbles over her high school sweetheart Richard (Patrick Saxe) and his friends Carl (Andrea Wylander) and Liz (Elin Hugoson).

She invites them all back to her crummy dump (lots of time spent driving around in Arctic conditions just adds to its zero-budget charm) where they fall prey to a multifaceted maniac (David Liljeblad—who also serves as producer and co-writer) with a penchant for pickax perforation.

He falls a bit short of frightening, but I would have appreciated two minutes of backstory on where this colorful killer came from.

With Blood Runs Cold, director Sonny Laguna gives us a fascinatingly unadorned minimalist study in the field of hack-and-stack. Not one dime of this film’s budget was spent on set dressing, wardrobe, or the cast; it’s all earmarked for blood, guts, and decapitation.

And if you ask me, that’s money well spent.

Rubber (2010)

Oh, France! What a nation of jolly, irreverent provocateurs you are! Why did writer/director Quentin Dupieux make a “horror” movie about a sentient car tire with terrifying telekinetic powers? As Lieutenant Chad (Steve Spinella) says many times during the film’s introduction, “No reason.”

In the middle of desert nowhere, a tire comes to life and uses its psychic ability to make heads explode. Nearby, an audience of nitwits watches the action through binoculars. The tire becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman (Roxane Mezquida) in a Volkswagen and trails her to a decrepit motel.

To his credit, Dupieux has made a marvelously intricate and witty movie that poses a passel of burning questions to its audience. (That would be you and me. The audience with the binoculars has been poisoned with bad turkey—except for the guy in the wheelchair played by Wings Hauser.) It would be easy to dismiss Rubber as absurdist twaddle with a side of pretension, but it’s filmed so cunningly through low-angle cameras that roll us right along with the murderous tire, that it becomes a brutally hypnotic experience. And by then, it’s too late.

Unlike similar exercises in reflexive filmmaking by Dupieux’s highbrow cinematic forebears (Godard and Wenders come to mind), Rubber maintains a much-needed sense of its own playfulness that keeps the whole business from sinking under the weight of its concept.

Even while some of the characters ponder the reality of the situation as if they were in a staged reading of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Dupieux seems to be more interested in why we’re still watching this nonsense. You see, Monsieur Director, as nonsense goes, Rubber is hard to ignore. Will there be a sequel with the tricycle?

Night of the Demon (1957)

Let’s dispense with the chit-chat and get down to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: Whether you see it as Night of the Demon (the full-length British feature) or Curse of the Demon (the American version with 12 minutes edited out), you’re in for a sweet ride.

Based on the M.R. James short story “Casting the Runes” this black-and-white creep-a-thon is required viewing in the horror canon—and if your tender sensibilities can’t fathom a scary movie without a shower scene or diced camper, then I suggest you move on.

Generic 1950s leading man Dana Andrews stars as John Holden, an American psychiatrist and skeptic, who travels to England to expose “devil cult” leader Julian Karswell (Niall McGinnis) as a fraud.

The problem is, he isn’t one, and soon Holden realizes the avuncular Karswell has slipped him a piece of paper with a powerful curse on it. (I think it translates as “Hey demon, please mangle and mutilate whatever sorry sack of shit has the misfortune to be in possession of this here paper. K? Thanks!”)

Karswell coolly informs Holden that he will be taking a dirt nap in three days, prompting the spooked shrink and his comely sidekick (Peggy Cummins) to race around the English countryside in search of a solution.

Credit the skills of veteran director Jacques Tourneur for creating a true atmospheric classic. Demon, as well as previous films such as The Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and the noir masterpiece Out of the Past (Robert Mitchum’s best movie?) demonstrate Tourneur’s finesse with camera angles and his juggling of light and shadow to create menace.

The apocryphal story of Demon concerns the studio’s decision to have an actual demon appear at the beginning and end of the film, contrary to the wishes of Tourneur.

IMHO, it would have been a fine movie without it, but I appreciate the effort to give viewers a nightmare they can take home with them. It’s really not a bad demon; I’ve seen much worse.