PopGap Diary: Octoblur 2022

I watched Society (1989) last year as part of Octoblur 2021, but brought it out again this year to show to some friends.

Here's my review from last year, which still holds, although I now feel less derisive toward the narrative:

Some horror movies are all about their special effects, and if any movie deserves to perch triumphantly from atop a gooey, rubbery mountain of oozing ersatz flesh, it’s Brian Yuzna’s wackadoo Society (1989). And it’s a good thing that Society's climactic make-up effects orgy (literally) is so impressive because the rest of it barely qualifies as a passable first-draft screenplay. Bizarrely named Billy Warlock — an unholy mash-up of Charlie Sheen and Michael J. Fox— stars as an unimpressive character who takes close to 80 minutes to uncover the secret transhuman nature of his small town’s elite society, and if there’s a purpose to any of it beyond vague satire Yuzna never lets on. However, that late scene where high society lets loose with its excessive appetite for carnal consumption — courtesy of latex wizard Screaming Mad George  — is something to see and makes the aimless narrative and non-existent characterizations seem incidental.

This low-budget Indonesian cult classic was given a loving remake a few years ago by Joko Anwar (as Satan's Slaves (2017), reviewed during Octoblur 2018), and it's easy to see how, despite its limitations, it fueled the nightmares of a future horror director. Director Sisworo Gautama Putra applies a dreamlike quality to this story of a wealthy family whose secular ways have made them vulnerable to evil following the death of their matriarch, and that creepy atmosphere — hints of Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot (1979), aided by some subtly odd production design — compensates for the iffy special effects and poor staging during key moments. If there's a critical flaw to Satan's Slave (1982), it's that its scares don't mount and build exponentially but rather exist separate enough from each other to make its climax less impactful than desired. Especially compared to the crazy horror coming out of other Asian countries during the same time period, this is pretty mild, slow and anti-climactic. And, although it's what one might expect from a horror movie from a country with strict religious practices, the didactic epilogue is a snooze. Putra seems to try and counteract that with a shocking revelation of some kind, but I have no idea what the final shot is supposed to suggest.

Taken in tandem with An American Werewolf in London (1981) from the year before, John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is the peak of practical special effects. So brilliantly gruesome and creative in design and execution. That alone is a thing of staggering beauty and, sadly, a relic of the past. The movie is also a brilliant study of paranoia, with indelible characters subtly portrayed by a stellar cast of actors. One of the titans of genre cinema. Any cinema, for that matter.

This amiable B-movie is the first of three adaptations of the Fritz Leiber novel Conjure Wife — and is decidedly less artful than Burn, Witch, Burn (1962; aka Night of the Eagle), which I reviewed seven Octoblurs ago — and is hokey fun within its limitations. Lon Chaney, Jr. stars as a sociology professor — his domain is rationalism – who marries a young woman raised on island superstition. When he makes her throw away all of her voodoo-ish charms, his life quickly goes down the toilet. Although it misses the darker undercurrent of the 1962 version, the cast is strong (look for Elizabeth Russell, from Cat People (1942)) and the tone is light and bouncy (incongruously at times). The ending is its weakest point, an attempt to tuck away any residual darkness, but reflective of its era. One of a handful of attempts to parlay the popular Inner Sanctum radio program series into a franchise of movies starring Chaney.

This is an oddball final chapter in Christopher Lee's Dracula career. Alan Gibson once again directs from a script by Don Houghton, but this feels miles away from their previous collaboration on Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972). This one feels less like a vampire movie than it does a James Bond-knock off. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is back, this time at the behest of a secret government agency that has infiltrated a Satanic cult of prominent politicians, scientists, and industry leaders. As they uncover a plot to release a new superstrain of Bubonic plague, Van Helsing traces it back to the CEO of a new multinational corporation... and the CEO is Dracula (Lee)! For a complete curveball, and with a Dracula that is nearly unrecognizable from the ineffectual goon of earlier franchise entries, The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) is still pretty fun as an unlikely genre mishmash, if a bit slow. It also isn't interested in the teasing glimpses of nudity offered by the previous couple of movies but commits boldly to the new era of gratuitous skin. Joanna Lumley appears in the role previously played by Stephanie Beacham and doesn't make much of an impression. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) ends like it doesn't know it's the last of its series, and maybe like it doesn't even know it's the end of a movie, which leaves a weird aftertaste, but otherwise, it's a nice swerve to finish off what turned out to be a generally high-quality horror franchise.

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) ignores the previous movie and jumps right into some new action as Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) — He's back, having been MIA since Brides of Dracula (1960) — chases down Dracula (Christopher Lee) and impales him with a broken wagon wheel. A fun title screen jump skips 100 years, to Van Helsing's great granddaughter (Stephanie Beacham), who bops around swinging London with a "group" of friends including the occult-obsessed Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame). Johnny must have seen Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), because he tries to enact nearly the same ritual. Drac returns and fixates on taking long-desired revenge by preying on Van Helsing's lovely descendant, but must also deal with Van Helsing's son (also Cushing). Alan Gibson directs crisply and with style. Caroline Munro gets some nice crazy moments, and Lee is scarier than usual. The incongruous score, pairing jazzy disco with gothic horror, is a nice change of pace.

Directed by Rebekah McKendry, co-host of the All the Colors of the Dark podcast, Glorious (2022) is a well-constructed little two-hander that relentlessly prods at one of my greatest fears: contact with public restroom surfaces. It's maybe not fair to her movie that this was my main pre-occupation while watching it, but she did set her movie inside a rest-stop bathroom, and star Ryan Kwanten starts by resting his face on a disgusting toilet seat (and later worries that he touched his face with hands that touched the seat... Dude!), and at one point curls up on the floor inside a stall. The floor inside a stall!

So, OK, there's a Lovecraftian demon (voiced by the unmistakable J.K. Simmons) in the next stall holding him prisoner, but that doesn't mean he needs to lay down where 100 other people splatter-pissed recently. I wasn't only distracted; the type of soul-searching dialog exchanged between Kwanten and the demon lurking behind the fancifully painted gloryhole isn't really my cup of tea, though it will appeal to others and is fairly well-done for a style of faux-insightful psychological introspection that I associate with middling off-off-off-Broadway playwriting. I also think that McKendry neuters her movie with a twist that turns it the whole narrative into a cheap trick rather than something probing some kind of truth, as it feigns doing for its agreeably short running time. If the twist's reveal had been known from the start, this had the potential to much more interesting. Good imagery, though.

A clever idea pulled off with far more panache than expected, Here Comes Hell (2019) attempts to merge the 1930s-style "old dark house" genre with the more contemporary mayhem of The Evil Dead (1981). A small cast of archetypal characters assembles in a decaying English manor for a night of revelry, but a misguided seance opens a gateway to hell. Gore ensues. Shot on video on an extremely low budget — reportedly less than $25,000 — Here Comes Hell surprisingly excels most during its dialog-heavy set-up. Director Jack McHenry gets sharp, measured performances from his cast, and the script co-written by Alice Sidgwick is witty and knowing about old-school drawing room comedies. This type of mannered homage is very easy to butcher, but as a unit, the cast and crew nail the style. Up through the seance, which is extremely effective thanks to more tight directing and a wonderful performance by veteran Maureen Bennett, Here Comes Hell seems like a real hidden gem. Once "Hell" breaks loose, however, so does McHenry's careful control, and some initially fun practical special effects give way to poor CGI in scenes that seem poorly devised. But just when Here Comes Hell seems like it's run out of original ideas or has gotten too sloppy, it manages to insert inspired moments of creativity that suggest a lot of promise for future movies from McHenry's Trashouse Productions. While not as holistically parodic as
Larry Blamire's wonderful The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001), Here Comes Hell shares a lot of the same spirit and enough skill to earn that solid company. Jessica Webber makes for a very appealing heroine, so hopefully there's more to come from here. as well.

This unusual Devil-thriller seems like pieces of 4 or 5 different movies smashed into one, and I'm not sure it always picks the best pieces, but it sure is an interesting mess to behold. A trio of reincarnating holy warriors are on constant guard against the rebirth of Satan, who has returned this time in the form of teen weirdo Andrew (Stefan Arngrim) — a classmate of the latest reincarnation of Arcangel Hulle (Kathleen Rowe McAllen). After some gay panic between Andrew and a hoodlum — whose idea of bullying is to kiss other boys on the mouth while naked in the gym shower — Andrew finally gets around to raising the dead just in time to interrupt the town Passion Play. If that doesn't sound like a carefully crafted plot, you're right: writer-director Frank LaLoggia is all over the place in Fear No Evil (1981), jumping decades, flipping genders, and focusing on what seem to be non-sequitur subplots, instead of, you know, Satan himself gearing up for some mayhem. There is some elegant filmmaking and acting at times. As one of the angels, Elizabeth Hoffman is especially delicate, striving for a level of beatification that no movie like this deserves, and Arngrim is pretty good, too — when he wails, again and again, "I was promised!" his anguish is palpable, even if his meaning is up for grabs. At other times, Fear No Evil is full of exactly the kind of cheap ham-work you might expect from low-budget horror, and, despite some bonkers moments, seems to not know where its exploitation energies are best spent. During the finale, LaLoggia certainly attempts to pull off an extravaganza of dazzling special effects, and his ambition is admirable if his execution isn't. The movie is also somewhat renowned for its notable selection of post-punk and new wave songs — Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Ramones, etc. — that seem to have been randomly scattered on the soundtrack in uneven clumps. A real curiosity. Future "Coen Brother" Joel Coen is credited as an Assistant Editor, the same year that he earned a similar credit on another low-budget horror indie, The Evil Dead (1981).

Before I forget,  here's a list of some of my favorite horror movies about cults, loosely defined:

• Rosemary's Baby (1968); dir.: Roman Polanski
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978); dir.: Philip Kaufman
• Get Out (2017); dir.: Jordan Peele
• Suicide Club (2001); dir.: Sion Sono
• Freaks (1932); dir.: Tod Browning
• The House of the Devil (2009); dir.: Ti West
• The Wicker Man (1973); dir.: Robin Hardy
• The Witch (2015); dir.: Robert Eggers
• Midsommar (2019); dir.: Ari Aster
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); dir.: Don Siegel
• Suspiria (1977); dir.: Dario Argento
• The Howling (1981); dir.: Joe Dante
• Village of the Damned (1960); dir.: Wolf Rilla
• Bone Tomahawk (2015); dir.: S. Craig Zahler
• King Kong (1933); dir.: Merian C. Cooper
• Race with the Devil (1975); dir.: Jack Starrett
• Us (2019); dir.: Jordan Peele
• Messiah of Evil (1973); dir.: Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz
• The Mephisto Waltz (1971); dir.: Paul Wendkos
• I Walked with a Zombie (1943); dir.: Jacques Tourneur
• Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971); dir.: Joël Séria
• A Dark Song (2016); dir.: Liam Gavin
• Island of Lost Souls (1932); dir.: Erle C. Kenton
• Starry Eyes (2014); dir.: Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer
• The Devils (1971); dir.: Ken Russell
• The City of the Dead (1960); dir.: John Llewellyn Moxey
• Hereditary (2018); dir.: Ari Aster
• Blood on Satan's Claw (1971); dir.: Piers Haggard
• The Neon Demon (2016); dir.: Nicolas Winding Refn
• Angel Heart (1987); dir.: Alan Parker
• Alison's Birthday (1981); dir.: Ian Coughlan
• Burn, Witch, Burn (1962); dir.: Sidney Hayers
• The Children (1980); dir.: Max Kalmanowicz
• Witchcraft (1964); dir.: Don Sharp
• Society (1989); dir.: Brian Yuzna
• The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977); dir.: Don Taylor
• Baskin (2015); dir.: Can Evrenol
• Bloody Birthday (1981); dir.: Ed Hunt

Another of my most-anticipated watches this month is Hammer Studio's occult thriller The Devil Rides Out (1968), directed by Terence Fisher, which fits perfectly with Octoblur 2022's main theme of cults, preferably Satanic. Christopher Lee stars as, surprisingly, the hero of this story, a Count who drops in unannounced on an old friend and suspects he has crashed a Satanist club. With the help of a dim-witted skeptic (Leon Greene), Lee conspires to subvert an upcoming Sabbath ritual and release two new initiates from the hypnotic grasp of malevolent leader Mocata (Charles Gray, who would play Bond villain Blofeld a few years later in Diamonds are Forever (1971)) and Satan himself. The Devil Rides Out moves swiftly from premise to action and gleefully mixes authentic Luciferian tropes (The Path of the Left Hand! The Goat of Mendes!) with more fantastical rituals and incantations. It's fun, even if it's never clear what if anything this cult has in store, or why a goat-headed Satan is making personal appearances at such modest shindigs. This is one of a few horror movies of the period that was bizarrely rated X in the UK and G in the U.S. Hopefully, I'll see more Lee and Fisher collabs later this month.

One of my most-anticipated movies this Octoblur has been Eyes of Fire (1983), directed by Avery Crounse. It's seen a big boost in its reputation since the release of last year's mammoth folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) and a subsequent release on Blu-ray and streaming. Sadly, I found this ambitious frontier horror mostly impenetrable, due to incoherent storytelling. A group of English/Irish settlers face unknown horrors as they travel... somewhere? For some reason? While there are eerie images in Eyes of Fire (1983) — faces embedded in a tree trunk, naked mud people in random tableaux, some kind of bright-eyed hag who does...something? — Crounse seemed especially challenged in drawing characters, making sense of their actions, and connecting scenes to tell a story — it probably doesn't help that this particular story has two narrators, a complication that adds no value but doubles the confusion. Scenes begin with no context, end with no climax, and cut to seemingly unrelated other scenes. There is no anchor to which a viewer might moor itself, making all of the long moody spaces between eerie moments painfully uninteresting: Why am I watching these people? What am I supposed to glean from anything that is happening? — These types of foundational questions can kill the buzz of the coolest horror scenes, and, at best, Eyes of Fire's scenes were sort of neat but not all that special. Like the all-too-brief early appearance of iconic Christmas crazy Will Hare, greatly disappointing.

I watched Viy (1967) as part of Octoblur 2015 and more than just its wild final 10 minutes has stuck with me since then. There's something about the color and setting of Viy that combine for an especially haunting ethereality. Khoma, a seminary student on vacation has an unfortunate encounter with a witch — she rides him like a pony and he beats her to death — and is then commanded by her rich family to pray over her corpse for three nights to release her soul from the evil spirit that possesses it. Khoma, however, is neither a good student nor a devout holy servant, and finds himself at battle with supernatural forces beyond his comprehension. Leonid Kuravlyov gives a nice comic performance as Khoma, and Natalya Varley is stunning as the possessed girl, but it's the look and feel of this Soviet-era period piece that makes it indelible. That this failed to parlay into a notable career for either director is a shame.

Classic "island horror" starring Dorothy Burgess as Juanita, a New York socialite who is mysteriously drawn back to the Carribean island where she was raised — against the urging of her uncle, who has noted increased intensity in the local voodoo rituals. If you can get over that this one of those movies where a character says, "The natives are restless!," as well as some less vague expressions of racial discontent , there are some potent thrills in Black Moon (1934) involving human sacrifice and child grooming, even if they may have been muted by production codes. stars Fay Wray, who would find herself in even deeper "island horror" a few year later in King Kong (1933).

One of the better recent slashers, I first watched Hell Fest (2018) a couple of Octoblurs ago, in 2019. It's lean and doesn't caught tangle itself up in the overwritten or self-aware garbage that makes too many post-Scream slashers a drag. It sticks to the classic formula, and does so in the neat setting of a horror theme park. Good stuff that deserves a bigger following.

My second Made-for-TV movie of Octoblur 2022's opening night is the tantalizingly titled Satan's School for Girls (1973). Well, tantalizing and more than a little spoilery. Pamela Franklin (fresh off the great And Soon the Darkness (1970)) stars as a young woman who enrolls undercover in the private school that she holds responsible for her little sister's suicide. It turns out that her sister isn't the sole casualty, due to a secret... well, it's in the title, so it's not a secret. And there really isn't enough to it beyond the title's description, other than a pleasing 1970s vibe. If there's a plan of any kind beyond recruiting future Satanists, it's not clear, and Satan (who describes himself provocatively as "the hammer of witches") doesn't even seem that into it. Underwhelming now, but in its time maybe evoked the Manson girls with some potency. Co-stars Kate Jackson, Jo Van Fleet and Cheryl Ladd. An Aaron Spelling production.