Halloween Highway: The Stuff

In 2008 the Avenue hosted a week of horror movies called Halloween Highway. As of this year, Halloween Highway will be back around 31 October. This year it’s a double offering, the recent Dutch horror film Sint and today it’s cult classic The Stuff.

Why Larry Cohen, the director of a.o. The Stuff hasn’t been in the Avenue’s spotlight is even for us a guess. Even at DV, where the Avenue was hosted from 2004 to 2011, Cohen never got the mention he deserved. This is something we’ll soon change and one of Larry Cohen’s movies will be allowed into the Kurtodrome Vault but one thing is sure: it won’t be The Stuff.

I didn’t like The Stuff when I first watched it. Oddly enough, I remembered it more fondly than I usually do for unpleasing movies. Maybe that’s why, when I was recently given a chance to buy The Stuff for a bargain, I whopped out my wallet.

The Stuff is a yoghurt-like substance that’s absolutely yummy and quite healthy too… apart from the fact it eats you up from the inside. Well, we can’t have it all, eh? A former FBI officer (hey, didn’t we tackle that cliché yesterday in Sint?) finds a couple of like-minded souls and tries to get the world to understand eating the Stuff is not good for you.

That is the short summary. There are a couple of things I’ve always found strange about the film: how, supposing The Stuff is so lethal, does it keep harmless enough to get in the shops? Why does an avid opposer of the product eat it (or else, how could he be eaten up)?
Those are just two examples of a plot that doesn’t always make sense and then we’re  glossing over the special effects that don’t always deliver. As Larry Cohen mentions in the dvd commentary, the film was made on a tiny budget and the time of digital effects wasn’t yet upon us. And it’s true: those cruder effects sometimes do look more realistic than sophistically made digital effects. That is why the unconvincing effects don’t bother me. Cohen also mentions they used lots of things for The Stuff and this is something I also noticed the first time I watched the film: the product doesn’t always move in the same manner.

Nitpicking aside, the tiny budget and occasionally apparent lack of convincing effects actually works in the favour of Cohen, the maverick director of “guerilla cinema” – something that’ll be the main focus in the upcoming Vault entry and therefore we won’t spend too much time on it now. The dvd commentary reveals that because of the shoestring budget Cohen sometimes had to improvise and that storyboards were hardly ever made. The film continued itself once a location was discovered, much like The Stuff seemed to find its own ways.

The commercials for this delicious product are a clear satire on our consumer behaviour and that’s something Cohen evidently wanted to show. The producers didn’t allow the director to put some fake commercials up before the credits of the film and I have to agree with Cohen that this was a bad decision. Nevertheless, you can’t deny the tongue-in-cheek mockery of 80s culture. Maybe that is what helps The Stuff sell itself these days. Then again, it’s The Stuff. Of course it’ll manage to be sold.

The Region 2 dvd is as basic as it gets: there are not even subtitles, but there is a short text on Cohen’s career, a trailer and there’s a director’s commentary that is somewhat entertaining. It’s mainly useful if you haven’ t seen the film in 10 years and want to hear some details while rediscovering the film. That’s the way I watched it and though I liked the film better than the first time I’d watched it I don’t think it’s essential horror – or even essential Cohen.

6.5/10

That’s it for 2011′s Halloween Highway. The next regular update of Avenue Kurtodrome will be on 5 November.

Halloween Highway: Sint

Halloween is upon us and that means we should honour the old DV tradition of reviewing horror films on said day. Now for lots of countries, Halloween was a foreign tradition up to the moment the business market smelled a possible profit and soon the global invasion of the pumpkins started. Here in the low countries there’s a different tradition: Sinterklaas, or Saint Nicolas. This bishop who’s even older than The Doctor and an avid lover of children, comes to our shores in early December with the help of his black servants in order to bring lots of toys to good children and nada to the naughty. Bad children used to be put in the servants’ sacks, but that’s no longer the case. Either children are no longer naughty or Sint(erklaas) and the parents have chickened out.

Some adults will tell you the Sint’s tale is only a myth and that it’s actually the parents who buy stuff for their children. Well, that simply isn’t true. Nor is the aforementioned story true. The truth is much more terrifying… the Sint wasn’t born on December 5 (when Dutch kids get their presents – in Belgium the children get their presents one day later), but he died on that day. I say “die”, but actually he was brutally murdered on that night and now, every time December 5 coincides with a full moon, the Sint arises from the netherworlds and enjoys a lovely killing spree with his legion of black servants (read: zombies). Anyway, that’s the version Dick Maas wants you to believe. The Dutch director of the cult classics De Lift and Amsterdamned is back in business and apparently he still remembered all the tricks of the trade. The poster for Sint caused lots of controversy because if you looked carefully at the face of the Sint you’d see a zombie skull. Also, it might have been a problem for parents telling their young offspring that this was a Sinterklaas movie they weren’t going to watch in the cinema. Another director, famous for directing brainless tits-out-for-the-lads bubblegum cinema, started a campaign to boycott the film and thus Dick Maas got all the attention he’d wanted. But was Sint worth the publicity?

Halloween Highway: Sl8n8 (Slaughter Night)

For more than a decade noone wanted to make a horror movie in Holland. All of a sudden two appeared out of nowhere. The first was Sl8n8, the second Dood Eind. Whereas the former took pride in a star-studded cast (read: four people you already knew from other movies), the latter went for the special effects. More about Dood Eind (Dead End) later in the year, tonight we focus on the movie with the crappy title. The Dutch word for Slaughter Night (the film’s international title) is “slachtnacht” and – wouldn’t you know 8 is spelled “acht” in Dutch. Hence the clever Sl8n8. It’s enough to make one skip the movie. Well, of course they thought it would draw the mobile phone generation to the theatres, being all wicked with its use of numbers.

Next up: the cast. This is led by Russian-Dutch icequeen Victoria Koblenko and Kurt Rogiers, who’s Belgian and excels in appearing in terminally hip Dutch shows and crappy movies. Now that’s promising! The rest of the cast are unknowns, which – combined with the knowledge that the movie includes the word ‘slaughter’ in its title – enables you to guess just which two characters will survive the night.

Whereas Dood Eind has the advantage of my having seen an interview with the creators (where they expressed their love of horror movies), Sl8n8 has me puzzled: I’m still not sure whether this was an attempt to make a genuine horror movie (for the love of the genre) or an attempt to mix as many horror clichés together and make the mix look like a movie.

Bear with me as we’ll dissect the plot: Kris, a young girl (Koblenko), is in having a row with her father when their car is hit by a truck. As the trucker tries to get her dad out of the vehicle while Kris is calling the emergency line, the car explodes. After his death Kris imagines hearing her father’s footsteps and finds out about his work when the window suddenly blows open in the middle of the night. Also, the tv set suddenly starts playing, but this is apparently normal and the only electronic device to behave abnormal in the entire movie. Anyway, Kris volunteers to get her dad’s stuff from his office in Belgium. It turns out that dad was writing a book about an alleged devilish person. Anyway, Kris heads to Belgium with her bunch of annoying friends and, judging by everyone’s reactions, the Dutch mourn the dead for just about 38 hours. Her father’s boss sort of forces her to visit a tour down the mine shaft, claiming her dad couldn’t stay out of the mine himself, and so down Kris and her friends go, together with a Belgian guy (Rogiers) who’s taking a disfunctional brother and sister down the mine for therapeutic reasons. Therapy is apparently quite different in Belgium.

Anyway, despite the guided tour being there on regular hours, someone forgot about this tour group and closed off the electricity which helps the elevator go up. So what does one do while the tour guide is going to climb up an alternative way up (a ladder, conveniantly located somewhere completely different)… oh, why not a lovely session with the ouija board? Anyway, the ghost of the devilish person (who, after killing seven – sorry, se7en – people was forced to work down the mine) enters one of the Belgians in need of therapy, the possessed Belgian hits a Dutch girl on the head (massive head wound) and runs away from the group. Not really wicked, eh?

And that’s when the shit really hits the fan: both in the movie and for the viewers. In the movie the eight – sorry, 8 – find out that, according to the legend, it would take the devilish man exactly eight people to get out of hell. Oops! Eerily enough, whenever a person is possessed by the demon their teeth deteriorate. I kid you not, they suddenly have bad teeth. It is probably the first movie where demonic spirits are linked to tooth decay. And if you thought that still made sense… how about the elevator that seems to work only when the characters need to get up? Or the demonic entity also taking the elevator up to chase some victims, thus completely ignoring the demon was allegedly trapped in the mine?

But all this is not even as bad the most awful thing about the movie: in order to look cool the directors wanted to shake the image during the action scenes. To do this, they must’ve hired a cameraman suffering from the worst case of Parkinson’s disease, strapped in a wheelchair with uneven wheels. I swear, the only way you can sort of see what’s happening in Sl8n8 is by furiously headbanging in the opposite direction. After five minutes of this movie you’re exhausted!

Anyway, in case you become too tired to watch the climax of the movie: it’s quite predictable and you’re not missing much. To be fair, Victoria Koblenko is a good lead, but there’s nothing for her to lead: not the rest of the cast you can’t warm up to, not the cliché-ridden plot, not the awful camerawork. One can only hope Dood Eind will prove to be a bit more fulfilling. If you wait more than a decade for a homegrown horror movie (provided you’re Dutch) and are treated to a bag of clichés any Hollywood movie could’ve given you, you can only feel disappointed.

3.5/10

Halloween Highway: Scary Movie

Hands up if you didn’t expect me to review this one. Well, to be honest, this movie was offered for free by my digital tv provider. It’s as good an excuse as any, really.

Anyway, it gave me a chance to see a recent Wayans brothers movie. I knew them from long ago (when they made In Living Color, which was responsible for the success of the Wayans family as well as a certain James Carrey). I also know their recent reputation (makers of unfunny comedies) and watched The Daily Show episode with one Wayans family member. A clip from their most recent movie Little Man was shown and – literally – three people in the audience had to laugh. Not the best of signs.

Scary Movie is better than Little Man, though do not force me to watch Scary Movie 3. The first two scenes (incl. a parody of Scream - which used “Scary Movie” as a working title) I found genuinely funny. In fact, don’t believe the people who maintain In Living Color was highbrow. It wasn’t.
After a good start the movie continues with unfunny material. In the end I decided to keep a chart, carefully noting the scenes and jokes I loved vs. those I hated. The result? 21scenes and jokes made me laugh (or chuckle), 54 I truly hated. (That would’ve been 52, but the end credits feature two jokes, one even worse than the other.) Nevertheless, 21 good scenes or jokes isn’t that bad: it means that statistically Scary Movie is seven times as funny as Be Kind, Rewind (the horror, the horror).

Among the scenes I really didn’t like were the overused joke that one character may be gay and all the scenes with Marlon Wayans as a pot smoker. You’d almost be excused for thinking Marlon is a crappy actor (he’s also the unfunniest person in the joke-free Little Man) but don’t forget he was also in Requiem for a Dream. So, it isn’t that he isn’t a good actor, it’s just that he has a horrible taste for comedy.

All in all, for every excellent parody Scary Movie tends to serve you (i.e. Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer) you also get an unfunny parody (The Blair Witch Project‘s parody is by far the worst) and own material which should’ve stayed on the drawing board. There’s also much too much emphasis on the meta-joke (“It’s as if we were in a movie.” – “We are, there is the director and the scriptgirl.”) even though this sometimes works (“You can’t do this to me!” – “Why not? Did you think I Know What You Did Last Summer made any sense?”).

The math genius in me decided that 21 in favour versus 54 against with a lot of undecided moments equals 28%. If we’re lenient, we’ll make that 3/10. But don’t expect me to find screenshots or posters for this post.

Halloween Highway: Scream and Scream Again

Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in one movie? With the addition of Hammer girl Yutte Stensgaard (Lust for a Vampire, Zeta One), surely such a movie can’t be bad! That movie is Scream and Scream Again and unfortunately I couldn’t find myself enjoying it.

Scream and Scream Again was a co-production of AIP and Tigon, released in 1970 and directed by Gordon Hessler. Hessler is mainly known for three other movies: The Oblong Box, Cry of the Banshee and KISS meets the Phantom of the Park. All movies which rate him as a cult movie director, just not a director of good cult movies. All have a certain je ne sais quoi (note we’re trying to overcome our shortage of French words at the Avenue) which make them watchable but not exceptional.

In Scream and Scream Again we witness a maniac on the loose, nicknamed ‘the vampire killer’ because he also sucks the blood out of his victims. We hardly see this happen, as this isn’t the focus of the movie. Which brings us to my key point: what is the focus of the movie? The film begins with an exhausted jogger dropping on the ground, someone trying to get into some sort of Nazi-like regime (yes, they even copied the red and white design, just with a different symbol in the circle’s middle), a überstrong killer on the loose… this movie is going places!

Sadly it’s going in four directions at the same time, which leaves the viewer feeling quartered. It’s a cop thriller, a sci-fi movie and a vampire flick. As mentioned before, the vampire scenes are barely mentioned, the sci-fi element seems directly lifted from an episode of Doctor Who or The Avengers and the cop thriller is so overexposed and stretched it’s still full of cops, but not exactly thrilling. And don’t be fooled by the poster of the movie: the acid bath is hardly there.

If there’s still a chance you want to watch this, it’s because of the cast. Cushing, Lee and Price in one movie is always worth an hour and a half of your time. Even if Cushing was a late addition to the cast and only shows up in a couple of scenes. Of the three movie legends, Price gets most of the screentime. Sometimes it looks as if he’s rehearsing for Dr. Phibes. Well, who can blame the man? Years later, Vincent Price was interviewed about the movie and confessed he’d never understood the script. See, now there’s a consolation: you’re not alone.

4.5/10

P.S. Anyone want to see the trailer?

Halloween Highway: Rest Stop

Howdi, stranger. I saw you hiking and decided to pick you up. It gets fairly lonely here on this long road. So buckle up and tour with me for a full week of horror movies.

Our trip begins with Rest Stop, a straight to dvd movie released in 2006. The writer and director is one John Shiban, a name that shouldn’t be unfamiliar to you if you followed the Chris Carter series. He wrote quite a few good X-Files episodes, one Harsh Realm episode and was one of the creative forces behind The Lone Gunmen show. Erm, maybe I should’ve known that last bit before I bought Rest Stop. All I knew was that he was a staff writer for The X-Files and that some of the better episodes were penned (and occasionally directed) by him. I learned something today: if part of someone’s filmography is okay, it isn’t bad to also look at the lesser successful part of the filmography. It shields you from extra disappointment.

The story in short: a young couple stop at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere because the girl needs to go to the restroom. The toilet doors are filled with scary sentences about a killer and everything inside is dirty. When the girl leaves the toilet, her boyfriend and their car have disappeared. Every time she tries to leave the place a truck manages to block her escape. Etc. etc.

Rest Stop isn’t awful, but you couldn’t force me to say it’s good. Not even if you try some of the persuasion methods seen in what’s sadly called “torture porn” movies. Rest Stop starts as a thriller, then opens a can of supernatural elements (not bad if you can show your X-Files pedigree here) before sadly opting for the path of torture porn. Is there really a need to see someone drill holes in parts of the body that don’t need them? If there is no ass-raping sequence in Psycho, it’s not only because Hitchcock wasn’t allowed to include it. It’s because it’s just not necessary to show every gory bit in detail… because sometimes it just hurts the movie.

The moment Rest Stop stops trying to be a supernatural horror movie and starts trying to cash in on the popularity of movies like Saw and Hostel (and their 700 sequels), the carefully built-up premise is thrown out of the window (complete with explosion, of course). Gone is Rest Stop‘s sense of atmosphere, now it’s replaced with an attitude of “Look how twisted we dare to be!” Shiban, who was a story editor during season four of The X-Files, should’ve known this. That was the season of “Home” (with freak brothers) and “Unruhe” (where a mad guy tried to lobotomize Scully). Those stories worked because the atmosphere came first and the gore (mainly in “Home”) only came second. What wasn’t shown on screen was filled in by your own imagination. Which is far superior than seeing someone bite off a finger (for no obvious reason).

Speaking of which, it takes a looooong time before you can feel sympathy for Nicole (Jaimie Alexander). Mainly because she decided to flee from her parents with one of the most annoying douchebags you’ve seen in a horror movie. By the time you do feel sympathy for her, the story becomes so incredible it’s impossible to the movie characters any longer as living creatures (because you’re too aware you’re watching a movie). That’s what an overdose of gore does to a viewer.

Yes, like Aja’s abysmal remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Rest Stop gloats in gore so much you see through it. Here is another movie that tries to be scary, is what you come to realize. And none of what follows will still scare you, not even the occasion return to its original form (the atmospheric supernatural thriller). What doesn’t help either is that most of the plot is quite familiar from other movies: a mysterious car blocking your exit, the torture porn, the weird (and deeply religious) family who are in the neighbourhood, the maniac you just can’t kill… stop me if you haven’t heard those before. And no, I’m not saying Rest Stop should’ve been a horror movie with brand new scares, but I can’t accept its soulless attempt to suck some blood (or money) out of Hollywood’s latest horror franchise. And yes, like all the torture porn movies, there is a Rest Stop 2.

Rest Stop 2 seems fairly impossible after watching the first movie, but they did manage to find a way to make the sequel credible. However, Nicole is no longer played by Jaimie Alexander. Now there’s a smart girl.

I have second feelings about ending this review with the usual score out of 10. Because sadly I can’t say the movie was as awful as I may have made it look now, even if that’s only thanks to a good performance by Jaimie Alexander and to John Shiban’s experience at The X-Files. The man can sure polish a turd. Now, how would you like me to rate the movie? As the excellently polished turd it now is? Or as the turd that’s still smelling underneath the surface? Rationally I should give this 4.5 or 5 out of 10. Emotionally, I want to go for a lower score. You decide.