brendan halpin

Decided to check out Messiah of Evil on Shudder, even though it was made by Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, the duo who brought you the most racist Indiana Jones movie (no, not that one—Temple of Doom) and the execrable Howard the Duck movie that I, as a huge fan of Steve Gerber and the original HTD comics, am still angry about 37 years later. (Oh yeah, they were also involved in Best Defense, a horrible movie with Dudley Moore and “strategic guest star” Eddie Murphy in a glorified cameo. Saw it with my mom, and I’m pretty sure we’re the only people ever to see that movie.)

Anyway, the blurb called this a “forgotten classic” or something, and while that may be stretching it a little, it’s definitely worth watching despite its flaws. So let me start with the flaws. It just doesn’t really hang together as a story, and we never really get to know the protagonist (played by Marianna Hill) that well and anyway Michael Greer as Thom steals every scene he’s in. ( Apparently he did a couple of gay porn movies and basically ruined his non-porn acting career, which is a shame because he’s got a great screen presence, and the question of whether and how much we should trust him is the most engaging through line in the movie.)

The setting seems very creepy because we only see brightly-lit, mostly-deserted spaces at night. The island of fluorescent light in a sea of darkness turns out to be a creepy rather than reassuring image here.

And there are two sequences that are among the best I’ve seen in a horror movie. I’m not going to go into detail, but the supermarket scene and the movie theater scene are both absolutely top-notch. The movie theater especially is a masterpiece of slow burning dread.

The movie is surprisingly squeamish about gore for a movie about cannibals, but those two scenes alone make it worth your ninety minutes.

#review #movie #horror #shudder

Doing my best to stay spooky this month, so I’ve watched 2 horror movies in the last two days! Well, one and a half horror movies.

Let’s start with Spirit Halloween. I couldn’t resist the premise, which is that complications ensue when some kids get locked in a Spirit Halloween overnight. And then I saw Christopher Lloyd and Marla Gibbs both being creepy as hell! This could be good!

And yet, it wasn’t. The movie focuses on the kids, who are…let’s just say not as interesting as the old folks. And the whole thing was pretty devoid of either scares or laughs, and you’ve gotta have one or the other in a movie like this.

Ultimately I turned it off halfway through because, unlike so many horror movies, this one felt like it was made with no love. One of the reasons I love horror movies so much is that the folks who make them so often have a deep love for the genre, and the love shines through even when budget constraints or lack of skill get in the way of a really good movie.

Here, though, it’s all really professional to the point of feeling cynical. We’ve got some kids on bikes for that Stranger Things vibe (the main kid here even bears a strong resemblance to the main Stranger Things kid), we’ve got a brand-name tie in, (Which prevents any interesting exploration of the cause of the abandoned storefronts where Spirit Halloween makes its home) and we’ve got some kind of scare-free supernatural happenings with an incoherent explanation. Ultimately a waste of Christopher Lloyd, Marla Gibbs, Rachel Leigh Cook, and 45 minutes of my time.

But surely you can’t go wrong with a Hammer Dracula movie starring Christopher Lee! O, would that it were so! Dracula Has Risen From the Grave does have Lee and a couple of really great images (why are Dracula’s blooshot eyes so creepy? I don’t know! Also him whipping the hell out of the horses is genuinely disturbing), but overall it spends wayyyy to much time with the anodyne young lovers. I realized that apart from the tempera paint blood and the cleavage (only the barmaid gets to show any in this movie so it’s clearly before Hammer fully figured out their brand), what a Hammer Dracula movie needs to succeed is a worthy antagonist for Dracula. That’s where Peter Cushing comes in, except he doesn’t in this movie. So instead of Van Helsing’s steely obsessiveness, we’ve just got some horny young people, and a subplot about how fighting vampires can cure you of atheism.

I watched it all, but if you’re making your way through the Hammer Dracula movies, this one is VERY skippable. It’s on MAX along with Horror of Dracula and Dracula A.D. 1972, both of which are superior to this. (A.D. 1972 also features a great party scene where a San Francisco roots/psychedelic band is inexplicably playing at a posh party in England!)

#review #movie #horror

I wish I knew more about music theory, because then I could probably explain why the music to this one is kind of unsettling. Some kind of note or chord that’s not exactly what you’re expecting, maybe?

Anyway, I’m a word guy, and the words here are, by Roky’s standards, pretty coherent. Threw the doll right down, ripped its guts out and threw it on the ground, no one stitches like that…I get it, man. Okay, I don’t actually get the no one stitches like that line, but we’re dealing with something pretty fearsome here.

Naturally when I had an opportunity to see the movie that gives this kickass song its title, I jumped at the chance, figuring because of the song that this would be a genuinely disturbing lost horror classic.

It’s not! I mean, it’s kind of fun in the way that 50’s B movies can be, what with the plot holes and the wooden acting, but it’s actually pretty dull. In short, Roky improved on the movie, taking something cheesy and transforming it into something actually creepy.

But here’s the thing I’m kind of obsessed with. There are two interludes in the song featuring movie dialogue, but it’s not recorded—it’s completely recreated by Roky. (The weirdness of the syntax may be something that attracted him to the movie, as the monster says, “I don’t look like him, but I am him. Don’t you recognize the voice of him?”)

Anyway, the song was recorded in 1979. VCRs existed, but they were pretty expensive. Producer Stu Cook probably still had enough CCR money for a VCR, but it seems really unlikely that Roky’s just-out-of-the-mental-hospital self had VCR money. And there were essentially no video stores in 1979 because there wasn’t a mass market to rent movies. So they only way there could have been a copy of this movie around was if someone owned a film print or if someone rich had taped it off late-night TV.

My point here is that I can’t understand how Roky recreated this dialogue verbatim unless he had memorized it. Which is a kind of wild thing to contemplate.

Anyway, this is one of my favorites. Here’s the song. And, if you’re curious, here’s the movie.

Watched two really good works of fantasy media within the last week. One was Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. This, as many others have said, was a fun, funny, rollicking adventure movie with a great “found family” theme and wonderful performances top to bottom. (Hugh Grant is an especially delicious craven villain) You do not have to know anything about D&D to have a fun time watching this movie, but if you do know something about D&D, it will only add to the fun. Unless you’re one of those killjoys who would point out that this two-hour movie would probably take months to run as a D&D campaign because of how incredibly much combat slows down the game. But I digress.

Fun adventure movies are few and far between. Pixar always wants you to cry, and Marvel somehow got a sense that they’re Important, and so the idea that you can have a good time at the movies watching a bunch of folks do something difficult and heroic seems to have gotten lost. I’m glad this movie found it.

On TV, I watched a really good fantasy show. Karen Pirie (on Britbox) doesn’t have magic or wizards or Owlbears, but it does feature a familiar fantasy trope: the incredibly competent cop who will stop at nothing to solve a case, even if it means taking on the entire power structure of the city.

If you can suspend your disbelief and remind yourself that this is only a fantasy, you’ll have a very good time with this well-acted, cleverly-plotted show. Lauren Lyle is especially winning in the title role, but there really isn’t a weak link in the cast. Of course it’s easier to turn in a good performance when you’re working from a good script, and Emer Kenny’s adaptation of Val McDermid’s novel (I was impressed enough by her 1979 to want to watch this because it was based on her writing) is really strong.

Fantasy media is fun, but it’s important to remember that if you see a guy in a robe on the street, he’s not going to be able to do any actual magic, and, similarly, you shouldn’t expect the folks in your town cosplaying dedicated, hyper-competent, deeply moral characters like Karen Pirie to actually be like that.

[Tangent: I watch a fair amount of British fantasy police shows, and everybody is DS this and DI that, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for a “DS Nuts” joke that nobody has thus far taken advantage of. I hope British TV will get on this ASAP.]

#review #tv #movie #fantasy

This is the song that led me to Roky Erickson. There’s a strange cover of this song on the Minutemen’s Three Way Tie For Last album, where Mike Watt is recorded playing a slow, acoustic version of the song over the phone.

Roky’s version, which kicks off 1986’s Don’t Slander Me album (Not an all-time classic like The Evil One, but still a pretty great record), is propulsive and hard-rockin’ and really sells the idea that Bermuda is an evil place with an irresistible allure.

My late wife Kirsten used to get enraged by this song. “Bermuda is a really nice place! Of course you want to stay! It’s beautiful!” But of course this isn’t about the real Bermuda so much as the idea of Bermuda.

Which you need to know a little bit about the 1970’s in order to fully get. The Bermuda Triangle, a particularly hard to navigate area of the Atlantic Ocean, has been the site of numerous airplane and ship disappearances. In the 1970’s, people proposed the idea that aliens were hanging out here and abducting people. Or that there was, like, a dimensional portal here, or whatever.

This idea was HUGE in the 70’s. As a kid, I was almost as scared of the Bermuda Triangle as I was of quicksand. Which is saying something.

So it’s here that Roky sets his song. In the innocent Devil’s Triangle (the more sinister alias of The Bermuda Triangle).

Does it call and haunt you? Make you wonder? Make you want to go?

Roky’s version on Spotify

Minutemen Phone version on Spotify misidentified as “Hittin’ the Bong”

This is a weird book that I think only a big-name author like McDermid could get published these days. I picked it up because Scotland and also because of my ongoing project to read and watch more mysteries that don’t center police detectives.

(This is partly due to my political problems with police forces in general, but also the police detective has just been done to death, and I can’t stand the cliches of cop fiction anymore. Oh, he’s haunted by that one case? Oh, he drinks too much because he’s seen to much? Oh, he has a daughter and struggles to be a good dad despite the aformentioned drinking and caring too much about the job? Feh. Seen it. And then seen it again. And again.)

But back to 1979. It’s about a plucky young woman who gets stuck writing dumb “women’s page” stories and kind of lucks into becoming an investigative reporter. But here’s what’s weird about the book: the structure. The first two thirds of the book center on the nuts and bolts of putting two big investigative stories together. This is pretty compelling, but it’s neither mysterious nor particularly suspenseful. The last third concerns a murder that is ultimately solved offscreen by the police for which there are only really two suspects.

In short, this is a crime novel that features a lot of crime and almost no mystery or suspense. That’s why I think it’s weird. The protagonist is winning, but I’m not sure I’ll be on board for the next one. Then again, I’m not sure I won’t be. Like I said, It’s weird. I’m still making sense of it.

#review #books

Recently watched the Netflix offerings Dear Child and The Woman in the Window. Both featured excellent performances and both, weirdly, left me feeling a little unsatisfied at the end.

Dear Child is a German six-episode series about a young woman and a young girl who escape from domestic captivity and how the mystery of who they are and what happened to them unravels. It’s well-acted top to bottom, with Nalia Schuberth turning in a fantastically creepy performance as the child, Hannah. I hope Germany treats its child stars better than we do, or else that she takes the money and leaves the profession for ten years.

The Woman in The Window is a Netflix movie starring Amy Adams as an incredibly wealthy (that house! In Manhattan, yet!) agoraphobic in yet another riff on Rear Window. Here, as in Dear Child, the performances are fantastic, especially Amy Adams, who does a really fantastic job bringing a complicated character to life. Julianne Moore and Bryan Tyree Henry (you may remember him as the highlight of Bullet Train) are great in supporting roles, and Gary Oldman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony Mackie are all wasted in small roles where they’re not asked to do very much. This is especially true of Oldman, who yells three times, and Leigh, who has, I think, 2 lines. Just a weird flex to put such talented actors in roles where you don’t give them anything to show what they can do.

Both the show and the movie, though, fail to stick the landing. The twists in The Woman in the Window are pretty good, but the final twist was just kind of meh to me. I guess the big reveal felt pretty mundane compared to what came before. Masquerade was a terrible movie and No Way Out was a pretty good movie, and both of them had big reveals that made you go, “WHOA!”. That’s not the case here. My reaction was, “hm. Interesting.”

Also, fun fact: did you know that almost getting murdered can cure your agoraphobia? Apparently that’s the case! Why would a movie lie about such a thing!

Dear Child has a lot of very satisfying twists, but literally every punch in the series is telegraphed, so that when it lands, it doesn’t really land. Here’s an example that will spoil very little. One character puts a hand on another character’s hand when they’re sitting next to each other. The second character moves the first character’s hand away. Two episodes later there’s a big reveal that these two had an illicit affair. And, like, duh!

It’s like that with every twist in the show, but the most egregious (and here be veiled spoilers, so proceed carfully) is that there’s a character whose face isn’t shown at all through 5 episodes. So naturally I’m thinking, “oh, he’s a character we know from somewhere else!” Nope! Just a guy!

Anyway, both were entertaining and had five star potential and three and a half star execution.

#review #netflix #tv #movies