Tag: #31daysofhorror

31 Days of Horror: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Post author By jdp
Post date November 5, 2016
6 Comments on 31 Days of Horror: A Nightmare on Elm Street

31+ Days of Horror. 33 Horror Movies. 33 Reviews. Hooptober Challenges and Bonus Tasks.
View my 2016 Cinema Shame/Hoop-Tober Watch Pile Shame-a-thon Statement here.

Nature of Shame:
Overdue rewatch / Unseen sequel / Unseen sequel

Hoop-tober Challenge Checklist:
Decade – 1980’s
Franchise

#22. A Nightmare on Elm Street

Two 31 Days of Horror a go (so, like, 2014), I caught the second half of A Nightmare on Elm Street on a cable movie network in HD. The image blew me away. Let me qualify that last statement. I hadn’t seen the film since I first watched it in a friend’s basement when his parents thought we were playing video games. In other words, like how many teenagers smoke pot. We watched a VHS tape on one of those 13″ TV/VCR combo jobbers. My baseline for this film: tiny and square.

This year, I decided to put this movie to bed, so to speak. I’d never properly seen A Nightmare on Elm Street or any of its sequels except, oddly enough, for New Nightmare, which came out on video at roughly the same time I first started watching Italian horror. Very loose causal connections at play.

With proper viewing conditions, A Nightmare on Elm Street remains an effective horror experience, despite the ways in which the formula has been ripped off and regurgitated throughout the 30+ years since its original release. I won’t suggest that Nightmare provides an experience in pure terror. The story undermines its own ability to terrorize by playing fast and loose with dream logic and Freddy’s ability to reach beyond his dreamscape. By doing so, the Elm Street flicks fostered Freddy as a monstrous personality, rather than a slasher figure as innately terrifying as Leatherface or Michael Myers. If Michael Myers is a Tom Brokaw, Freddy Kreuger is a Ryan Seacrest.

(I’m honestly not sure about that above analogy, but I think it works so I’m moving forward.)

Friday the 13th (1980) and Halloween (1978) had set the table years prior with straight-up psycho slashers. A Nightmare on Elm Street landed at theaters rather late in the 1980’s teenage pop-culture slasher cycle to be just another slasher film. Wes Craven understood that his monster needed more personality, that Freddy Kreuger needed to be something a little off center and a little self-aware. A Nightmare on Elm Street never properly breaks the 4th wall (Craven saves up all his proper nudging and winking for the Scream series) but Craven certainly tests the waters with Freddy.

In addition to Kreuger’s slice of self-awareness, Craven further inserts a twist in the Kreuger mythos. Freddy Kreuger assumed the role of “boogie man” because the community parents had tracked down the serial child murderer and burned him alive. Everyone on Elm Street became complicit in the murder and mayhem. When the film plays the “parents just don’t understand” card to cater to its teenage audience, this makes sense because the parents have already been established as a source of negative energy.

The primary conflict isn’t actually “Teenagers vs. Freddy Kreuger,” but rather “Teenagers vs. Parents.” Freddy Kreuger serves as the physical manifestation of teenage angst and anxiety. The burden of escalating sexuality, pending assignation of adulthood and the teenagers’ inability to confront their parents with mature conversations about their fears. The teenagers lack the maturity to palatably present these concerns, and parents, well, lack the maturity to address their teenagers as near-adult human beings rather than children.

The communication divide is Freddy Kreuger.

Now, let’s move on to those sequels.

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Availability: The A Nightmare on Elm Street Collection is available everywhere, including your dreams. Or not. This is Freddy Kreuger. He can do what he m’f’ing wants.

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Earlier 2016 31 Days of Horror entries: #1. Vampyros Lesbos / #2. A Chinese Ghost Story / #3. The Haunting of Morella / #4. Delirium (1972) / #5. A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin / #6. She-Wolf of London / #7. Son of Frankenstein / #8. Killerfish / #9. The Bride of Re-Animator / #10. A Bay of Blood / #11. The Seventh Victim / #12. The Fly (1958) / #13. The Fly (1986) / #14. Deep Red / #15. Dracula’s Daughter / #16. Day of the Animals / #17. The Unknown / #18. Kuroneko / #19. Komodo / #20. Tremors / #21. Tremors 2

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Tags #31daysofhorror, 31 days of horror, 31daysofhorror 2016, a nightmare on elm street 1984, freddy kreuger a nightmare on elm street, horror shame-a-thon, nightmare on elm street, wes craven a nightmare on elm street

31 Days of Horror Cinema

31 Days of Horror: Tremors / Tremors 2

Post author By jdp
Post date November 3, 2016
4 Comments on 31 Days of Horror: Tremors / Tremors 2

31+ Days of Horror. 33 Horror Movies. 33 Reviews. Hooptober Challenges and Bonus Tasks.
View my 2016 Cinema Shame/Hoop-Tober Watch Pile Shame-a-thon Statement here.

Nature of Shame:
Long overdue rewatch on Blu-ray / Unseen sequels

Hoop-tober Challenge Checklist:
Decade – 1990’s
Crazy Animal Movie
Franchise

#20. Tremors (1990)

I hold Tremors up as the pinnacle of modern creature features. After watching Komodo last week, I felt compelled to conclude the “Crazy Animal Movie” requirement of the Hooptober Challenge with this old favorite. I’ve owned the Tremors Attack Pack Blu-ray release for a few years now and I’ve failed, despite my intentions, to watch Tremors each of the past two Halloweens. I’d had it up to here with lackluster animal movies. Killerfish, Day of the Animals, Komodo — all of these films have only reinforced my aggravation over lazy savage animal movies.

I couldn’t decide if fictional animals counted towards the requirement, but I decided I didn’t care either. These were animals. They were crazy. Bring on the big ass worms.

Tremors works because it embraces the historical absurdity of the animal attack genre. Giant Leeches. Slugs. Killer shrews. You name the creature, it’s attacked people on cinema. With an eye on a retro-brand of filmmaking and a nod toward self-awareness, director Ron Underwood downplays terror in favor of spectacle and humor. In the place of exposition or a brief origin story, Tremors substitutes ecological wonder. Characters marvel at the existence of the Graboids, their physiological adaptations that have allowed them to exist undetected in the earth for millions of years.

They might want to eat you, but by god that’s an impressive specimen! Check out those independently operated tongue snakes! And spikes that allow them to push themselves through the dirt!

Impressive creature effects only carry a film so far. The tone of the film must reflect the creatures themselves. First, the creatures cannot be the joke. While the face-value of Tremors suggests otherwise, (giant carnivorous worms!) the Graboids never become the punchline. The high-concept narrative allows the tremendous, entertaining collection of character actors to act and react to a preposterous scenario. An isolated Nevada town under siege by subterranean monsters. A pair of mostly capable handymen, a geologist and a right-wing gun nut hold the fort.

Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross, Reba McEntire and Victor Wong (Big Trouble in Little China) buy in completely. (Though, Kevin Bacon has confessed that at the time he felt the film represented a career low.) With the worms presented as the Abbott to the humans’ Costello, the creatures can afford to just be monstrous. The rest of the humor comes naturally.

I might be blinded by irrational love for Tremors because it’s really not actually quite that good… but I’d be lying if I gave it anything short of five Hertzies.

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So what would happen to this balance when the sequel loses its director and goes direct-to-video six years later?

#21. Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996)

The film carries on.

The budget has been noticeably downgraded. The worms lose their independently operating snake-tongues and most of the special effects involve fountains of exploded worm goo. The actors outside Ward and Gross barely passed the “acting their way out of a paper bag” test. Chris Gartin replaces Kevin Bacon with a less mature version of Bacon’s already immature character and he’s only mostly annoying. Gartin comes around by the end of the movie but still reminds me of a low-rent Justin Bartha. Michael Gross inflates the NRA survivalist persona, filling up some of the personality vacancy.

Fans of the original will find enjoy #2. Aftershocks finds new creative ways to attack with worms. Recommended. Even the wife got into this one. Extra half star because reasons.

30Hz Movie Rating:

Availability: All four Tremors flicks can be had on the cheap. No excuse.

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Tags #31daysofhorror, 31 days of horror, 31daysofhorror 2016, horror shame-a-thon, kevin bacon tremors, tremors, tremors 2, tremors 2 aftershocks, tremors II

31 Days of Horror Cinema

31 Days of Horror: Komodo (1999)

Post author By jdp
Post date November 3, 2016
5 Comments on 31 Days of Horror: Komodo (1999)

31+ Days of Horror. 33 Horror Movies. 33 Reviews. Hooptober Challenges and Bonus Tasks.
View my 2016 Cinema Shame/Hoop-Tober Watch Pile Shame-a-thon Statement here.

Nature of Shame:
Unseen DVD

Hoop-tober Challenge Checklist:
Decade – 1990’s
Crazy Animal Movie

#19. Komodo (1999)

I’m entertained by the subtle ways I change the format of these posts. Each and every change I’ve made over the course of 19 posts wouldn’t even be noticed by the average reader. Hell, forget the average reader. If some person existed that made a sick point to read every one of these 31 Days of Horror posts, even they wouldn’t notice the differences. Give up? I centered the film title and poster. Swell, huh? (Help me. I’m losing my mind.)

But about Komodo.

Komodo belongs to the animal attack subsection of the horror genre. More specifically, the sub-sub-genre of animal attack movies where the attacking animal manifests as something innately toothless. The creature itself doesn’t have to be toothless, though that certainly solidifies its sub-sub-genre status. See: Slugs, Swarm, Night of the Lepus. You get the picture. Komodo falls into this category despite having a potentially monstrous killer creature.

Komodo dragons rule the isolated ecosystems in which they live — the tippy top of the food chain. They’re believed to be ancient lizards, dating back almost 4million years. The only species of these giants left on the planet. It was once believed that the komodo caused sepsis in its prey due to saliva highly concentrated with bacteria; however, recent studies from 2013 have shown that the bacteria resembles the saliva of just about any obligate carnivore. Myth in this instance proves more potent than fact. Even though the movie takes advantage of this sepsis/paralysis myth, it fails to render this trait — something that could have been used to foster some legitimate terror — as anything more than a footnote.

The film arrived in 1999 as part of the straight-to-video glut of creature features that took advantage of newly inexpensive CGI effects. Considering the film’s budget, the komodo effects — a mix of practical puppetry for close ups and CGI — become the movie’s one legitimate strength. Director Michael Lantieri (Jurassic Park‘s creature creator) has a good sense to withhold a full appearance of the dragons to maximize later utility. Though here’s the rub. Despite the komodo’s size and supposed paralytic saliva, they’re really not an inherently frightening animal. In order to turn them monstrous, Komodo‘s komodos become killing machines as a result of experimental hormone therapy.

The PG-13 rating prevents much bloodletting and discourages brutality that could have better established these hormone-laden killing machines. Even without knowing Lantieri’s connection to Jurassic Park, viewers will note a number of regurgitated setpieces and scenarios refashioned on a smaller Komodo/direct-to-video scale.

Final Thoughts:

Is there a reason to watch Komodo? No. Not really. Creature feature aficionados usually skew towards the more kitschy variety of films produced in the 1950’s and 60’s. Late 1990’s CGI with an $11million budget doesn’t generally wind their clock. With this kind of sub-sub-genre toothless creature attack DNA, Komodo needed to be less competent to be truly notable.

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Availability: Get your Komodo fix.

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Tags #31daysofhorror, 31 days of horror, 31daysofhorror 2016, horror shame-a-thon, komodo, komodo 1999, komodo movie