If you thought Rob Zombie shit the bed with 31, then fuckin' hold his motherfuckin' beer because the unwatchable 3 FROM HELL is the kind of career-killer that's so bad that even some of his "gooble gobble, one of us!" fanboy faithful began turning on him after the film's three-night Fathom Events run a month before its Blu-ray/DVD release. The third chapter in what's--fingers crossed--a trilogy that began with 2003's HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and 2005's THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, 3 FROM HELL seems like a desperation move after his pointless remake of HALLOWEEN and its disastrous sequel, his ambitious but unsuccessful THE LORDS OF SALEM--which at least tried to do something different before falling apart in the end--and the dismal 31 were all starting to make him look like a hick-horror one-trick pony whose entire filmmaking career was an endless tribute to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2. A brutally intense and absolutely uncompromising throwback to '70s grindhouse at its grittiest, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS remains Zombie's masterpiece, and he's never come close to duplicating it since. Even with 14 years to think about it, he doesn't even seem to have the slightest semblance of a game plan with 3 FROM HELL, which ends up looking like a flimsy excuse for Zombie, his wife Sheri Moon Zombie, and some friends from the convention circuit to hang out under the guise of belatedly continuing the saga of the homicidal, serial-killing Firefly clan, despite the fact that they went out in a Skynyrd-abetted blaze of glory on a desert highway at the end of the 1978-set REJECTS. Turns out they survived the hail of police bullets, spent a year in intensive care, and then ended up in prison. Cut to a decade later: leader Captain Spaulding (the late Sid Haig in his last film) is executed, and Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley) orchestrates an escape with his previously unseen half-brother Winslow Foxworth Coltrane, aka "Foxy," aka "The Midnight Wolfman" (31's insufferable Richard Brake) after killing now-jailed bounty hunter Rondo (Danny Trejo). Meanwhile, at another prison, Baby (Mrs. Zombie) is denied parole (no shit) but gets bounced by the corrupt warden (Jeff Daniel Phillips), whose wife is being held hostage by DESPERATE HOURS superfans Otis and Foxy.
The titular trio head to Mexico and hole up in a sleazy south-of-the-border shithole where they run afoul of Rondo's crime boss son Aquarius (Emilio Rivera), who leads a Mexican wrestler-masked kill squad known as the Black Satans, leading to a long shootout set to Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida," as if MANHUNTER doesn't already exist. There's no way to sugarcoat this: 3 FROM HELL is absolutely abysmal. There can't possibly be a script. It's obvious that Zombie's making this up as he goes along and just letting the actors wing it, and improv doesn't appear to be anyone's strong suit. Moseley recycles the same schtick he's been doing since TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 but never finds the sense of terrifying menace that he brought to Otis in the previous film. Here, he just talks a lot of shit. Brake doesn't offer much other than a tired Bill Moseley impression, which leaves him more or less looking like the copy-of-a-copy that the Michael Keaton clones made in MULTIPLICITY, and a grating Sheri Moon Zombie doesn't even seem to be playing the same Baby as before. Remember the "Tutti Fuckin' Frutti" scene in THE DEVIL'S REJECTS? That's where she's at from start-to-finish here, with bonus meows, hisses, and vamping histrionics as Zombie does fuck-all to rein her in lest he be sleeping on the couch. You also get Dee Wallace humiliating herself as a sexually repressed prison guard, Clint Howard as a hacky clown-for-hire who pisses himself, Tom Papa and ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13's Austin Stoker as TV news anchors, Daniel Roebuck as a reporter, and Richard Edson as a scheming Mexican pimp.
Sid Haig (1939-2019)
The sole saving grace--aside from the use of three James Gang deep cuts from the neglected Tommy Bolin era and an admittedly amusing scene with Sheri Moon Zombie doing a bad-ass slo-mo walk to Suzi Quatro's "The Wild One"--is the brief appearance of Haig, who's out of the film by the seven-minute mark. Frail-looking and obviously gravely ill, the beloved cult icon, who died just a few days after the Fathom Events screenings in September, nevertheless brings his A-game in his one scene, but when he's gone, it's quickly downhill from there. Tedious, ploddingly-paced, and ridiculously overlong at nearly two hours, the embarrassingly self-indulgent 3 FROM HELL is Rob Zombie hitting rock bottom, and the only thing it accomplishes is providing the final evidence one needs to concretely conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that THE DEVIL'S REJECTS was a fluke. No matter how bad it gets, Zombie will always have a core of apologists who will stand by whatever he does, so best of luck to them going forward. I'm done. (R, 115 mins)
NIGHT HUNTER (UK/US - 2019)
Shelved for two years before being dumped on VOD, NIGHT HUNTER is a bumbling and often incoherent procedural thriller that's just as formulaic as its title indicates and would've been right at home in the late '90s. In cold, snowy northern Minnesota, a young woman is killed jumping from a highway overpass while fleeing an unknown killer. Meanwhile, Cooper (Ben Kingsley), is a former judge who lost his wife and daughter to a killer who's never been apprehended. He channels his rage into becoming a vigilante who goes around entrapping, extorting, and castrating internet predators with the help of teenage accomplice Lara (Eliana Jones), a ward to whom he was appointed guardian. When Lara, who has a GPS tracker in her earrings, is abducted, the cops not only uncover Cooper's operation but they're also led to her location, where a deaf and mentally-impaired man named Simon (Brendan Fletcher) has several women held captive in cells in the basement. Marshall (Henry Cavill), a hard-nosed, inexplicably British-accented detective who--you guessed it--plays by his own rules, and profiler Rachel Chase (Alexandra Daddario) can't seem to get anywhere with him, and the mayhem doesn't stop even with Simon in custody: an entire forensics team is wiped out by a rigged gas leak in Simon's basement, another cop's baby is stolen, one is killed by a car bomb, and Rachel gets a bomb threat with a crayon-scrawled note reading (what else?) "Tick tock," meaning that someone else is pulling the strings and that Simon can't possibly be the primary culprit.
Writer and debuting director David Raymond corrals a solid cast in what should be a serviceable thriller, but it's so clumsily-edited and haphazardly-assembled that it never really catches fire. No by-the-numbers thriller like NIGHT HUNTER should be this hard to follow, and it ultimately can't even live up to its absurd potential as the next HANGMAN. Of course, there's a ridiculous twist 2/3 of the way through that a cursory glance at someone's medical records would've uncovered, but throwing in the big reveal and subsequently moving the plot forward demands that the cops be total morons. Daddario's Rachel has to be the dumbest profiler in the serial killer genre, and Fletcher obnoxiously overacts with the kind of slobbering, eye-bulging, vein-popping gusto that he brought to Uwe Boll's RAMPAGE franchise, his high point being when he yells "Tick tock, tick tock, who's the silly boo-boo?" while pissing on the walls of his cell. Elsewhere, a constipated-looking Stanley Tucci appears to be getting paid by the scowl as Marshall's irate captain, and Nathan Fillion is completely squandered as a police computer tech in a frivolous supporting role that literally anyone could've played. The Cooper/Lara plot thread is an interesting one that might've made a more entertaining film on its own, but NIGHT HUNTER can't stop tripping over its own feet, leaving Kingsley offscreen for long stretches (a good indication that they probably only had him for a few days) while we get character depth in the form of Cavill's boring, brooding Marshall trying to bond with his teenage daughter (Emma Tremblay) after splitting with his wife (Minka Kelly). Nothing against Henry Cavill, who's a fine actor under better circumstances, but wouldn't you much rather see a gonzo thriller with a vigilante Ben Kingsley going extreme TO CATCH A PREDATOR on some pedophile creeps? (R, 99 mins)
SPIDER IN THE WEB (UK/Israel/Belgium/Netherlands/Portugal - 2019)
Speaking of Ben Kingsley, he's clearly in one of his frequent "Just pay me and I'll do it" phases, and the tireless 75-year-old Oscar-winner's performance as an aging, weary Mossad agent close to being put out to pasture--whether voluntarily or by more aggressive means--is the chief selling point of the relentlessly talky and glacially-paced espionage thriller SPIDER IN THE WEB. In the latest from Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (ZAYTOUN, THE SYRIAN BRIDE, SHELTER), Kingsley is Avner Adereth, a spy for the Israeli government who's currently undercover in Antwerp, posing as an antiques dealer named Simon Bell. He's spent two years gathering intel on a Belgian medical supply company that he suspects is secretly involved in chemical weapons sales to Syria. Complicating matters is that his boss Samuel (Itzik Cohen) is losing confidence in him, believing Adereth to be slipping, burned-out, and flat-out making shit up and pocketing big payments designated for a source that he hasn't been meeting nearly as much as he's claimed. As a result, the clock's ticking on Adereth to produce some legitimate results, and Samuel assigns ambitious young agent Daniel (Itay Tiran) to babysit him and make sure the info he's giving them and the leads he's chasing are legit. Of course, Daniel is the son of Adereth's late colleague from back in the day, which brings emotion into play as the two form a hesitant bond. All the while, Adereth finds himself falling for Angela (Monica Bellucci), an environmental activist and doctor who works for the Belgian company and is unaware of their side-involvement in funding terrorism. She's also upset when he shows her how her employer has been polluting the fresh water supply, thus convincing her to get him a secret file called--wait for it--"Spider in the Web," that explicitly details all of their Syrian shenanigans. Convoluted double-crosses ensue, with at least one character not being who they claim to be, and it's all a rather rote imitation of John Le Carre, with Adereth even waxing rhapsodic on the author at one point in case you don't pick up on the influence. The generic SPIDER IN THE WEB is really nothing special, but Kingsley's regal performance single-handedly gives it a boost above the mediocre, making it worth a look on a slow night for his fans who don't mind their night getting even slower. (Unrated, 114 mins)
OPERATION TITIAN (Yugoslavia - 1963) Directed by Rados Novakovic. Written by Vlasta Radavanovic. Cast: William Campbell, Rade Markovic, Patrick Magee, Miha Baloh, Vjekoslav Afric, Irena Prosen, Manja Golec. (Unrated, 95 mins)
PORTRAIT IN TERROR
(US - 1965) Directed by Michael Roy (Rados Novakovic and Stephanie Rothman). Written by Vic Webber (Vlasta Radavanovic and Stephanie Rothman). Cast: William Campbell, Anna Pavane (Irina Prosen), Patrick Magee, Kerry Anderson (Manja Golec), Dante Gerino (Rade Markovic), Mike Astin (Miha Baloh), Al Astar (Vjekoslav Afric). (Unrated, 81 mins)
BLOOD BATH
(US - 1966) Written and directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman. Cast: William Campbell, Marissa Mathes, Linda Saunders, Sandra Knight, Carl Schanzer, Sid Haig, Jonathan Haze, Biff Elliot, Patrick Magee. (Unrated, 62 mins) TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE
(US - 1966) Written and directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman. Cast: William Campbell, Marissa Mathes, Linda Saunders, Sandra Knight, Patrick Magee, Carl Schanzer, Sid Haig, Jonathan Haze, Biff Elliot, Manja Golec. (Unrated, 79 mins)
Out now in what's likely a contender for the Blu-ray restoration/box set of the year, the low-budget 1966 cult horror movie BLOOD BATH is part of a quartet of films with one of the most complex and labyrinthine backstories in all of cinema. At the center is the legendary Roger Corman, who was attending a film festival in Adriatic coastal city of Dubrovnik when he was approached by representatives from Avala Film, one of Yugoslavia's state-run film organizations, about the possibility of co-productions and distribution deals. Looking to test the waters of the Eastern European film industry, Corman agreed to be a silent partner on the Yugoslav crime thriller OPERATION TITIAN, under two conditions: the movie would be in English and some of his people had to be involved to make it an easier sell in the US. Corman sent American actor William Campbell and Irish actor Patrick Magee--both of whom had just been in the Corman-produced DEMENTIA 13 and the Corman-directed THE YOUNG RACERS--to Dubrovnik to star in OPERATION TITIAN, with young protege and DEMENTIA 13 director Francis Ford Coppola tagging along as a production supervisor to observe director Rados Novakovic's crew and make sure Corman's money wasn't being wasted.
OPERATION TITIAN is a lethargic and draggy thriller about the heist of a priceless Titian painting and the murder of its owner, Ugo Bonacic (Vjekoslav Afric), by duplicitous Italian doctor Maurizio (Magee). Maurizio is working in cahoots with Bonacic's nephew Toni (Campbell), who believes the Bonacics are connected to the legendary Sordi family of artists. Toni is also pining for Vera (Irina Prosen), who's engaged to reporter Dzoni (Miha Baloh), who's working the Bonacic murder case with detective Miha (Rade Markovic). Novakovic stages several stylish sequences that owe more than a passing debt to both the German krimis of the era as well as Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN and the directorial work of Orson Welles. OPERATION TITIAN is an intriguing-looking and visually interesting film that too often gets bogged down by its confusing storyline and lugubrious pacing (its 95 minutes feel like three hours), with Novakovic far too willing to let too many sequences play like he's making a Dubrovnik travelogue. Corman wasn't happy with the resulting film and saw no potential for it whatsoever on the drive-in circuit, so he shelved it until early 1964, when he found two uses for it. One involved having in-house production and editing assistant Stephanie Rothman rework TITIAN into PORTRAIT IN TERROR, an overhauled version of the film that trimmed a lot of the fat from the clunky early scenes that go nowhere, streamlined some of the meandering story, rearranged some scenes, and replaced the TITIAN score with AIP library cues. Other than Campbell and Magee (his name misspelled "Patrick McGee" in the new credits), everyone else was hidden by Americanized pseudonyms and revoiced. Miha is now "Miho" and Dzoni "Donny," and one key character's offscreen murder is now seen in almost real-time detail in a new L.A.-shot sequence clumsily edited into the Yugoslav footage, with doubles who look nothing like the people they're supposed to be (the victim has a completely different hairstyle to obscure her face in the new footage). This murder takes place in broad daylight with the killer carrying the body for what seems like a mile and leaving a trail of blood behind before rowing it out to sea and dumping it in the Adriatic. Rothman's work was enough for Corman to declare OPERATION TITIAN salvaged, and with director credit going to the non-existent "Michael Roy," PORTRAIT IN TERROR went straight to US television in 1965 as part of an AIP syndication package deal.
While Rothman was working on PORTRAIT, Corman was determined to get his money's worth out of his botched Dubrovnik investment. Having taken bits and pieces of Soviet sci-fi films and working in new American footage in the past (like 1962's BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN being a reworking of a 1959 Russian film; Corman would also use Soviet sci-fi footage in 1965's VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET and 1966's QUEEN OF BLOOD, both featuring Basil Rathbone in the new scenes, wearing the same wardrobe on the same sets in scenes shot in a day), the thrifty auteur decided to use the same approach with OPERATION TITIAN. In early 1964, he commissioned Jack Hill, who was called in for cleanup duty to shoot some gory axe murders when Corman wasn't happy with Coppola's cut of DEMENTIA 13, to take 30 minutes of footage from OPERATION TITIAN and create a horror movie around it. A production assistant looking to get into directing, Hill enthusiastically saw this bizarre assignment as a challenge, and TITIAN had enough stark Eastern European location work and imposing old-world architecture that it just might work. Hill came up with BLOOD BATH, and he would need Campbell to shoot additional scenes in Venice, CA. Campbell thought turning TITIAN into a horror movie was a terrible idea, so he made exorbitant salary demands on Corman than the producer reluctantly agreed to since he needed Campbell to match the TITIAN footage. In Hill's BLOOD BATH (handling sound on the BLOOD BATH crew was a young Gary Kurtz, who would go on to be George Lucas' Lucasfilm partner and producer of STAR WARS), Campbell was now playing Antonio Sordi, a crazed Venice Beach artist driven to kill his models and preserve their bodies in wax (an idea Hill got from the fate of Magee's Maurizio in TITIAN). None of the primary Yugoslav TITIAN cast--Markovic, Baloh, Afric, and Prosen--appear in BLOOD BATH. Hill pulls off one legitimately stunning, Antonioni-esque shot in the California desert and has some surprisingly bloody murders throughout (more proof that it was Hill, and not Coppola, who was behind some of DEMENTIA 13's more memorable moments). There's also some Cormanian callbacks to A BUCKET OF BLOOD with some beatniks played by LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS' Jonathan Haze and a young Sid Haig, but for whatever reason--Corman off shooting THE SECRET INVASION is usually the cited one--Hill's BLOOD BATH got lost in the shuffle and was shelved by Corman...for the time being.
In 1966, Corman took another look at BLOOD BATH and while he still didn't like it, he wasn't done tinkering with it or squeezing every last nickel he could out of OPERATION TITIAN. Hill moved on to other projects (like the cult classic SPIDER BABY), so Corman assigned the BLOOD BATH revamp to Stephanie Rothman, who wrote and directed new scenes that now have Campbell's Antonio Sordi not only being a homicidal maniac artist, but also---wait for it---a vampire. An uncredited actor plays Sordi in the scenes where he metamorphoses into a bloodsucker, not for artistic reasons but because Campbell refused to do any more reshoots related to the now-two-year-old BLOOD BATH and even filed a grievance with the Screen Actors Guild against Corman for repeatedly reusing old footage of him in new movies and not compensating him for it (he lost, due to a loophole involving the source film--OPERATION TITIAN--being a foreign production outside of SAG jurisdiction). Combining footage from TITIAN and Hill's aborted BLOOD BATH with new footage of actors from Hill's shoot--Haze, Haig, Carl Schanzer as a Sordi rival, and Linda Saunders as a Sordi victim--plus scenes involving a new character, created by Rothman and played by THE TERROR's Sandra Knight, and a silhouetted double filling in for Sordi in a non-vampire scene, the revamped BLOOD BATH has Hill and Rothman sharing writing and directing credit, though they never collaborated and Hill has had nothing positive to say about Rothman's contributions. Considering it's a mash-up of three different productions dating back to 1963, it's amazing that it holds together at all, though it's sure to delight fans of rampant continuity errors.
BLOOD BATH was released by American International in 1966 on a double bill with Curtis Harrington's QUEEN OF BLOOD, where new and quickly-shot footage of John Saxon, Dennis Hopper, and Basil Rathbone was mixed in with scenes from the 1962 Soviet sci-fi epic A DREAM COME TRUE. Unusual for 1966, BLOOD BATH was in black & white since it still had to match OPERATION TITIAN, and it ran barely over an hour at just 62 minutes. When it came time to package the film in a syndication deal, AIP realized the film was too short. As a result, it was tweaked yet again, this time as TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE, with some scenes dropped and new footage added by Rothman, including two of the most blatant examples of pointless filler you'll ever see: a long and profoundly unsuspenseful foot chase, and an almost comically belabored five-minute interpretive dance sequence on a beach, with Saunders unconvincingly doubled by someone else. When that didn't add enough time, an entire subplot involving Magee's and Manja Golec's TITIAN characters is introduced in the final act, only with Magee badly redubbed to make it appear that he's a jealous husband convinced his wife (Golec) is having an affair with Sordi. These additional scenes got the film to 79 minutes, making TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE long enough to fit in a 90-minute time slot with commercials. Unlike Campbell, Magee was never called back for reshoots on any incarnation of BLOOD BATH (the future CLOCKWORK ORANGE co-star is uncredited in BLOOD BATH and TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE, and though he has a sizable role with the introduction of more TITIAN footage in TRACK, his appearance in BLOOD BATH is limited to one brief shot as a wax figure in Sordi's workshop), so it's not known how he felt about not being paid for three additional movies (four if you count Hill's never-released first cut of BLOOD BATH) or if he was even aware of it. TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE has enough deviations from BLOOD BATH that it should be regarded as its own stand-alone work as opposed to simply "the TV version of BLOOD BATH." Some of the shocking-for-the-time violence is toned down for TRACK, especially in the early murder of the character played by June 1962 Playmate of the Month Marissa Mathes. It's not really any better or worse than BLOOD BATH, though the interpretive dance scene, which rivals any extended MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE driving scenes, has to be seen to be believed.
Though BLOOD BATH has a bit of a cult following and one of the more colorfully lurid one-sheet designs of the 1960s, neither it nor its three distantly-related cousins OPERATION TITIAN, PORTRAIT IN MURDER, and TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE are very good. Nevertheless, for any true cult horror fanatic, Arrow's Blu-ray box set is absolutely essential as the most thorough archiving of the complicated history of this particular Roger Corman project. The bonus features include interviews with Hill and Haig, but the big selling point is film historian and Video Watchdog big dog Tim Lucas' video essay "The Trouble with Titian," an 81-minute look at Corman in the early '60s and everything that went into the making of OPERATION TITIAN and its variant offshoots. BLOOD BATH is a Blu-ray package that's not really designed for the casual horror fan but rather, the hardcore obsessive who likely won't mind that the tangled and fascinating behind-the-scenes chronicle of the four films proves to be more interesting than the four films themselves.
BONE TOMAHAWK (US/UK/France - 2015) Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler. Cast: Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Lili Simmons, David Arquette, Evan Jonigkeit, Kathryn Morris, Sid Haig, Fred Melamed, Michael Pare, Sean Young, James Tolkan, Jamison Newlander, Geno Segers, Zahn McLarnon. (Unrated, 132 mins)
An instant cult classic that actually earns the distinction, the horror-western hybrid BONE TOMAHAWK is the slow-burning directorial debut of novelist/musician/jack-of-all-trades S. Craig Zahler. Zahler's toiled on the fringes for much of his career, with his biggest brush with fame being when he was commissioned to script a ROBOTECH adaptation back in 2007 that ultimately never happened. He wrote the 2011 DTV horror film ASYLUM BLACKOUT, and in 2012, he had a martial arts series titled DOWNTOWN DRAGONS in the works for FX, but the network never moved it beyond the planning stage. Zahler found acclaim for his "western noir" novels like 2010's A Congregation of Jackals and 2013's Wraiths of the Broken Land, both books finding a huge fan in Kurt Russell, and the two became friends. Zahler wrote BONE TOMAHAWK for the legendary actor and the project was a labor of love--made for just $1.8 million, a shoestring budget by today's standards--that took several years to become a reality. It's a western like no other, one of the strangest and grisliest films of the year, and the kind of offbeat, original work that you just don't see much of these days. There's a reason it's getting a very limited theatrical release and being shuffled off to VOD. There's very little concern for commercial appeal here, though it will undoubtedly find an appreciative audience that will show it a lot more love than mainstream multiplexers ever would. Let there be no doubt: for better or worse, Zahler made exactly the film he wanted to make.
In the tiny town of Bright Hope, doctor Samantha O'Dwyer (Lili Simmons), Deputy Nick (Evan Jonigkeit), and injured outlaw Purvis (David Arquette) are abducted in the middle of the night from the sheriff's office by a tribe known as the "Troglodytes." Stone-age cannibals living undetected in caves in the vast terrain several days away from Bright Hope, the tribe came in search of Purvis who, with his late cohort Buddy (Sid Haig), disturbed a Troglodyte burial site and now everyone must pay the price. Sheriff Hunt (Russell), his loyal deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), sartorially dandy, lothario gunman John Brooder (Matthew Fox), and, against the wishes of everyone, Samantha's injured husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), hobbling around and delicately nursing a broken tibia being held together by two splints, embark on the long journey to find Mrs. O'Dwyer and Deputy Nick.
Of course, they encounter every obstacle on the way--the elements, their horses get rustled away, Arthur's leg keeps needing reset--and for about 90 minutes, it's a harsh, brutal western. That's just an opening act for the harrowing last section of the film, when the heroes encounter the Troglodytes and are taken prisoner, at which point the film turns into what might happen if Ruggero Deodato remade THE SEARCHERS. For all the talk of Eli Roth's THE GREEN INFERNO being the big 2015 Italian cannibal homage, time will show that BONE TOMAHAWK was the better gutmuncher throwback, despite its old west setting (the Troglodytes are legitimately terrifying and far more effective than the cannibal tribe in Roth's film). But before all that, in character-driven sequences that many may find laboriously-paced, Zahler spends a lot of time establishing who these people are and what life is like in Bright Hope, engaging in world-building the likes of which you'd find in a novel. That kind of detail is uncommon in most movies today and yes, BONE TOMAHAWK takes a good 40 minutes to really get rolling, but viewer patience pays off by the end, when you realize just how well you know these people and how emotionally invested you are in the horrific, nightmarish predicament in which they've found themselves. Russell (his facial hair a work-in-progress for its epic state in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming THE HATEFUL EIGHT, which he worked on immediately following this) is so good here and has one particular line of dialogue late in the film that's so devastating and heartfelt that it brought tears to my eyes, and I don't get like that over movies, especially cannibal horror westerns. The performances are just terrific across the board. Every few minutes, Jenkins, basically playing the chatty, Gabby Hayes/Walter Brennan old coot sidekick, gets some goofy bit of dialogue or there's some sardonically funny and quotable line from somebody (Sheriff Hunt's deadpan reaction to seeing Chicory's geriatric horse: "That is not a handsome horse") that really makes you come to know and care about the characters.
BONE TOMAHAWK overcomes some early jitters over the possibility of gratuitous fanboy-pandering with the brief presence of cult horror scenesters and convention regulars like Haig, Michael Pare, Jamison Newlander (THE LOST BOYS' Alan Frog) as the mayor, and Sean Young as the mayor's abrasive, henpecking wife, but they're soon out of the picture when the rescue mission gets underway. In an age when horror filmmakers approach their movies with a sense of entitlement that it's a cult classic right out of the gate, it's nice to see a film take some chances and risk alienating the audience, and to see the creative force behind it earn the trust of experienced lead actors who typically don't do this kind of "extreme" fare. Unfolding just like a really good book, BONE TOMAHAWK very slowly and deliberately pulls you in and its power sneaks up you. It's the kind of film where revisits will reveal something new and interesting that you didn't catch before. I can't wait to watch it again. Even the really gross parts.
Written and directed by Rob Zombie. Cast: Sheri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison, Jeffrey Daniel Phillips, Ken Foree, Judy Geeson, Dee Wallace, Meg Foster, Patricia Quinn, Maria Conchita Alonso, Andrew Prine, Richard Fancy, Sid Haig, Michael Berryman, Julian Acosta, Torsten Voges, Lisa Marie, Barbara Crampton. (R, 101 mins)
Rob Zombie's stylistically ambitious THE LORDS OF SALEM is a departure from his sick hilljack horrors of the last decade or so, which seemed to indicate the origins of a career-long tribute to 1986's THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2. Zombie managed to deliver a modern horror masterpiece with 2005's ferocious THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, a sequel to his awful 2003 debut HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES, but he's been floundering since. His 2007 prequel/remake of John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN was passable but unnecessary (do you ever feel the urge to revisit it?), and its 2009 sequel HALLOWEEN II was probably Zombie's career nadir. It seemed as if Zombie said everything he had to say with THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, a disturbing, nightmarishly savage piece of white-trash horror that felt like Sam Peckinpah remaking THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. THE DEVIL'S REJECTS established some much-needed bona fides for Zombie as a serious horror filmmaker rather than the object of fanboy adoration from the cult-horror scenesters. Unfortunately, Zombie hasn't built on the momentum of REJECTS, and an element of sameness has crept in: you'll get the same cast of B-movie horror and comic-con fixtures, a '70s aesthetic, several hundred F-bombs, and Sid Haig in a gravy-stained wifebeater. There's no denying Zombie is a huge fan of the genre and loves what he does, but with each new film he makes, it's become increasingly evident that he may very well just plan on coasting on REJECTS forever.
So on one hand, the different directions he takes with THE LORDS OF SALEM are welcome. But on the other, he's still cribbing from other directors and other '70s movies and the story here is thin, and worst of all, predictable. Salem, MA radio host Heidi LaRoc (Zombie's wife Sheri Moon Zombie) receives a promotional vinyl LP from an unknown rock band calling itself The Lords. The music is droning and repetitious, and when she plays it on the air, it seems to hypnotize the women of Salem (or, the three that Zombie shows). Meanwhile, local historian and witchcraft expert Francis Matthias (the ageless Bruce Davison) traces the melody of the Lords' song to a piece of music dating back to Rev. Jonathan Hawthorne's (Andrew Prine) burning-at-the-stake execution of a Salem witches' coven headed by the demonic Margaret Morgan (Meg Foster), back in 1696. After being exposed to the music, Heidi starts having bizarre hallucinations, relapses into drug abuse, and falls under the spell of her sinister landlady Lacy (Judy Geeson) and her "sisters" Sonny (Dee Wallace) and Megan (Patricia Quinn), modern disciples of the reanimated spirit of Margaret Morgan, determined to use Heidi as the vessel to bring a reborn Satan into the world.
Zombie achieves a really good look with THE LORDS OF SALEM, with a vivid and unforced 1970s aura that brings to mind any number of Satanism-themed films from that era. But perhaps most of all, Zombie uses this film as his own tribute to Stanley Kubrick, of all people. Though set in the present day, much of THE LORDS OF SALEM looks like what might've happened if a 1975 Kubrick made a low-budget devil-worshipping flick that debuted at the bottom of an all-night drive-in marathon with RACE WITH THE DEVIL, THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN, and MESSIAH OF EVIL. The framing, the long tracking shots, the production design, striking visuals, and the droning score are all straight from THE SHINING (listen to the music when Heidi goes into Apt. 5 for the first time; it's that same repetitive beat when Jack goes into room 237 and finds the woman in the bathtub), and there's even some EYES WIDE SHUT stuff going on in a couple of scenes. There's other bits that are blatantly cribbed from Roman Polanski (there's a big ROSEMARY'S BABY influence here), Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and even Michael Winner, as the finale recreates some imagery from 1977's THE SENTINEL.
THE LORDS OF SALEM looks terrific, but that only takes it so far. Even with an effective performance by Sheri Moon Zombie (who really doesn't deserve all the "She's in his movies just because she's his wife" backlash), Zombie's script just doesn't have the substance to go along with the style. There's flashes of well-constructed characterization, particularly in Heidi's platonic relationship with on-air partner Whitey (Jeffrey Daniel Phillips, surprisingly solid considering he's best known as the Geico caveman), but the whole film really shows some signs of post-production tinkering and indecision. Depending on the scene, Salem is either a bustling suburb with enough of a radio audience to support a nightly show with three hosts (there's also a toupeed Ken Foree), or it's a virtually empty ghost town. Heidi wakes up in the morning and goes to take her dog for a walk, but it's night when she walks outside. Maybe that's being nit-picky, but it's sloppy construction. Zombie revamped much of his script during filming, which led to several actors--including Udo Kier, Daniel Roebuck, Clint Howard, THE BRADY BUNCH's Christopher Knight, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE's Camille Keaton, and the late Richard Lynch in what would've been his final screen appearance--seeing their work entirely Terrence Malick'd out of the completed film. One of Zombie's better decisions with the actors is to let the three modern-day witches really tear it up: Geeson and Wallace really sink their teeth into it in the third act, and it's great to see cult actress Foster and her distinct, ice-blue eyes on the big screen again. Haig (natch), THE HILLS HAVE EYES' Michael Berryman, and RE-ANIMATOR's Barbara Crampton have blink-and-you'll-miss-them bit parts and there's also a small role for apparent cosmetic surgery victim Maria Conchita Alonso as Matthias' wife.
Zombie wears his love of B-movies and trashy horror on his sleeve, and that's great. But it's not enough to carry a weak script that feels like its own writer wasn't sure where he wanted to go with it. By the time Zombie gets to the climax, which resorts to decidedly unfrightening evil dwarves and other surreal, blasphemous, sub-Jodorowsky imagery, it becomes obvious that he was just throwing anything against the wall to see what stuck. I like that Zombie tried something different and with little concern for mainstream, commercial appeal with THE LORDS OF SALEM, but when it reaches its crazed fever dream of a finale, you'll realize that Panos Cosmatos did this kind of thing much better with last year's BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW and accomplished it without resorting to things like cheap shock tactic shots of masturbating high priests.
Directed by Fred M. Andrews. Written by Fred M. Andrews and Tracy Morse. Cast: Mehcad Brooks, Serinda Swan, Dillon Casey, Lauren Schneider, Aaron Hill, Amanda Fuller, Sid Haig, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Daniel Bernhardt, Lance Nichols. (R, 93 mins)
I saw a trailer for CREATURE late last summer before DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, and I wasn't alone in thinking "Uh...no way that's opening in theaters." To everyone's surprise, it opened in early September as one of several new films hitting theaters nationwide on the same weekend. Horror fans, having seen CREATURE on the cover of Fangoria as well as through numerous online ads, instantly gave it their blind seal of approval on internet discussion boards, declaring it the must-see movie of the weekend, essentially saying "Screw CONTAGION! CREATURE looks like a real horror flick for the fans!"
CONTAGION opened in first place that weekend, and CREATURE opened...in 19th. It pulled in $327,000 on 1507 screens, giving it the worst opening weekend of any film on more than 1500 screens. Ever. It averaged $220 per screen, giving it the second worst per screen average of any wide release. Ever.
So what happened, fanboys? I thought CREATURE was the movie to see.
Sid Haig in CREATURE. Or any one of
the last 15 movies in which he's appeared.
How did a low-budget monster movie distributed by something called The Bubble Factory end up on 1500 screens nationwide? Well, the Bubble Factory is a company owned by former Universal CEO Sid Sheinberg, largely credited with "discovering" Steven Spielberg. It was Sheinberg who greenlit JAWS and was around a couple decades later for JURASSIC PARK. It was also Sheinberg who infamously battled with Terry Gilliam over BRAZIL and it was Sheinberg who pieced together the butchered and ultimately unreleased "Love Conquers All" cut of the film against Gilliam's wishes. Sheinberg left Universal at some point after the mid-1990s buyout by Seagrams and formed The Bubble Factory with his two sons. Sheinberg and his family still undoubtedly have more money than they'll ever spend, which explains how CREATURE managed to get such a wide release, even though The Bubble Factory claimed it was "experimental marketing." Yeah...experimental marketing made possible by access to ludicrous amounts of money. You'd think someone of Sid Sheinberg's stature could find better projects to bankroll than a subpar SyFy-level movie with mostly unknown actors. Aren't there more meaningful, ambitious projects for an old studio warhorse like Sheinberg to get behind? And look, everybody loves the guy, but is it a good sign when Sid Haig is the biggest name in the cast?
The convoluted and rather perverse plot involves a group of obnoxious vacationers heading to New Orleans, driving through an off-the-map podunk town and finding their trip detoured by the backwoods legend of Lockjaw. Lockjaw is a half-man/half-gator who was once inbred local Grimley Boutine (Daniel Bernhardt). How he mutated into Lockjaw doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but does it need to? The vacationing idiots want to check out Grimley's cabin, abandoned for 100 years, and after setting up camp, end up coming face-to-face with Grimley/Lockjaw, who pursues them through the surrounding bayou area.
Mehcad Brooks vs. CREATURE
Equal parts THE DESCENT, THE WICKER MAN, and HEE HAW, CREATURE throws in some twists and has a weird incest theme throughout, so it gets points for earning its R rating with gusto, and in all fairness, it's hardly the worst thing that's ever played in theaters. It only made headlines and gained its notoriety by bombing so spectacularly that it earned cult status as soon as the weekend grosses posted on Box Office Mojo by Sunday night of the opening weekend. It's really nothing more than the kind of trashy, on-the-cheap, by-the-numbers splatter flick that gets dumped on DVD every week...just one with enough pull behind the scenes to somehow make it into theaters.
Amanda Fuller, presumably looking
for a way out of CREATURE
It's pretty disheartening to see the promising Amanda Fuller in this. Her work in Simon Rumley's unbearably grim and profoundly depressing RED, WHITE & BLUE (2010) was a revelation. But she's still young and establishing herself. I'm not sure what Pruitt Taylor Vince is doing in this as Grover, the hapless village idiot. An always-working, always-reliable character actor most recently seen as the doomed Otis on THE WALKING DEAD, Vince turned in an acclaimed performance in the 1995 indie HEAVY and has worked for the likes of Oliver Stone, Wim Wenders, and Giuseppe Tornatore, but here he is, stumbling and bumbling around and getting his face chewed off by a half-man/half-gator 25 minutes in. I guess everybody's got bills to pay. As expected, Sid Haig is cast radically against type as Sid Haig.
CREATURE's dismal box office performance set new standards for bombing in theaters. But it's really just your ordinary bad DTV horror movie that accidentally made it to the big screen. We're not talking about an MST3K-worthy yukfest here. There's a nice shout-out to Jack Hill's SPIDER BABY (1968), which featured Haig. But mostly, it's indifferently acted and slow moving and the best that can be said about the work of first-time director Fred M. Andrews is that he keeps the camera pointed in the right direction.
