Project Horror, Day 6: Dead Snow

Today ends the Classic Horror Block, and begins Zombie Week!  Several friends recommended this one, including my cousin Drew.  What up, Drew?  Holwerdas represent!

There are very few movies that you can  adequately summarize with just two words, but this movie is one of them.  Zombie Nazis.  Zombie Nazis!  Here's how I imagine the writers meeting...
WRITER 1: "Right, so we need a villain.  What's the most evil thing you can think of?"
WRITER 2: "Nazis, dude."
WRITER 1: "I was thinking zombies, but you've just given me an idea."


A group of friends, med students on Easter break, go to a remote cabin to relax and party.  A stranger comes by during the night and tells them about the region's dark history, and about a detachment of Nazi soldiers who looted the nearby town of all its valuables before being driven into the mountains to freeze to death.  After that, well, you've seen a zombie movie before, right?  The cabin is besieged, a few members of the party attempt an escape, there are casualties on both sides...


Although this movie covers all the usual bases, there's enough fun in the details and execution that I really enjoyed it.  One of the members of the group is a movie buff, and wears t-shirts with posters of other zombie movies.  When two of the characters are arming themselves, there's a very quick, very great little homage to Evil Dead when one of them grabs a chainsaw.  Best of all?  After five days of horror classics with creaky paces and Hays Code restrictions, I finally got to watch a movie that not only had a body count, but also a kill before the opening title card.


When 28 Days Later came out a few years ago, it introduced a new element to zombie movies, the fast and aggressive zombie.  I'm still kind of torn about this.  To my mind, a zombie should still be a shambling mindless body whose real strength comes from overwhelming numbers and unstoppability.  Dead Snow is very much in the fast zombie camp - in fact, not just fast, but also strong and intelligent.  These zombies still use weapons!  Even though I'm still a fan of the slow zombie, I still thought this setup really worked.  The commanding officer in particular cuts a very menacing and impressive figure.  The scene where SPOILER he chases down one of the students and clocks him with a hammer was great.


A very fun movie, definitely worth catching if you're a fan of zombie flicks.  I give it five German stick grenades out of five.

Project Horror, Day 5: Vampyr

What the hell did I just watch?  Seriously - what the hell?  Part of me thinks that maybe I'm just not doing a good job of understanding this thing as a product of the time in which it was made.  The other, louder part of me says, "Well, Holwerda, you knew that it was a Scandinavian film from the 1930s when you hit Play.  You rolls your dice, you takes your chances."

I cheated after I watched this movie and looked up its plot summary on Wikipedia.  With the benefit of that, it kind of made sense, but not before.  The story is about a young traveler and student of the occult who takes a room in a lonely inn.  There, he is awakened by a distressed old man who leaves him a package labeled, "To be opened after my death."  That was about the last really clear moment of the film, but our hero ends up going to the old man's house and rescuing his daughter from vampirism, all while various other strange things are going on.  I also learned from Wikipedia that this movie had a very negative critical reception when it was released, which at least makes me feel better about not liking it now.

There are two good things I can say about this movie.  The scene where the hero sees his own body in a casket is genuinely unsettling.  Also, I didn't see the ending coming, but that's probably because I had absolutely no idea what was happening.  Tonight was my last night with classic horror before I start my block of zombie movies tomorrow, and I think it'll be nice to watch some movies where something actually happens.

I give this one scythe out of five.

Project Horror, Day 4: Werewolf of London

Discuss - to be a classic, does something have to be both old and well-regarded, or is it enough simply to be old?  I decided that for the purposes of choosing classic horror movies for my first five nights, simply old would suffice.

Day 4, and we reach a movie that I not only have never seen before, but that I know absolutely nothing about.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I assumed that Werewolf of London would have a werewolf and that he would be in London, so I wasn't entirely spoiler-free.  Really, I saw that this was available on Netflix instant streaming and removed another movie from my list to put this one in its place for no reason other than this:

This is timely, because I just had a haircut yesterday.  Like the werewolf drinking a pina colada outside of Trader Vic's, my hair is... Perfect.  Also, if there's one thing that movies like Pink Cadillac and Love Don't Cost a Thing have taught me, it's that movies that share titles with songs are awesome.

Werewolf films are hard to pull off.  Vampires are easy.  Take an attractive lead character, add fangs, boom.  With werewolves, if you opt to make the monster look more on the human side, then you run the risk of it looking like a ridiculous fuzzy person.  If you make it look more animal, then you lose the expressiveness of the person beneath.  Add to that the fairly primitive make-up effects available when this movie was made, and it's impressive that it's as good as it is.

Plot summary - a botanist journeys to Tibet in search of a rare flower, and is bitten by a werewolf while he's there.  Upon his return to London, he is approached by another botanist with an interest in the flower.  The protagonist gradually learns that the blooms can provide a temporary antidote to lycanthropy, which is also why the other botanist wishes to obtain them.  (Plot twist!  The other botanist is the werewolf that bit him!)

To be honest, the story itself was just so-so.  There's a side plot where the scientist's wife becomes reacquainted with an old love, and from the moment the guy comes onscreen, you know that he's only there to be wolf chow.  When our hero takes to the streets for the first time as a wolf, he pauses first to put on a coat and hat.  But there are some good little touches that still make it worth a watch.  The early scenes in Tibet are very well shot, and there are some good comic relief characters.  My favorite thing was the wolf make-up.  This movie came out a few years before Lon Chaney's much better known The Wolfman, and the make-up in this isn't as good, but they did an interesting thing with it.  Each time he transforms, he becomes a little more beastly than the time before, as though he's gradually becoming more and more of the wolf.

Nowhere near my favorite werewolf movie (that honor currently goes to Dog Soldiers), but fun if you're looking for a classic Universal Monsters picture and have Netflix streaming.  I give it three silver bullets out of five.

Project Horror, Day 3: The Fly

After two nights of B&W, it was almost kind of jarring to start this movie and have it play in color.  Especially since one of the first scenes is pretty gory by 1950s standards, showing the aftermath of a man being killed in a hydraulic press.  I've seen David Cronenberg's 1986 remake a few times (BrundleFly!), but never the original, so I was looking forward to this one.

Now, The Fly in a nutshell, in case you haven't had time to hear about it in the past 50 years, or seen it spoofed on The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VIII.  Brilliant scientist creates a teleportation device, decides to test it on himself, and only finds out once it's too late that a fly was in the device with him.  Scientist is left with the head and one arm of a fly, while a fly with a human head and arm is loose someplace in his house.

Three days into Project Horror, and one thing I've already noticed is the much different pacing and intensity between modern horror movies and classic ones.  Where most modern ones ratchet up the tension and atmosphere pretty quickly, the classics tend to build over the course of the movie to one big reveal, one big scary moment.  It's not good or bad, just different.  I have to keep reminding myself of that, because to a modern watcher, the more deliberate pace can also seem much less exciting.

Still, I have to give this movie credit.  What could have been another forgettable 1950s creature feature is still considered an influential classic today, and I think it's because the focus isn't even so much on the creature as it is on the effect that his transformation has on his family.  The most intense scene in the movie isn't when his fly face is finally revealed, it's when his wife is frantically trying to capture the fly with his head so that he can try to reverse the process.  And of course the famous final scene, where we see that same fly trapped in a spider's web, screaming for help as he's about to be devoured...  That's the one part of this movie that I'd seen before, and even knowing that it was coming, it still delivered.

I'm docking The Fly one point for a petty reason.  I really couldn't stand the kid who played the scientist's son.  Did you ever notice how many child actors in Hollywood classics are truly awful?  All they had to do was show up, look cute, and give poorly-inflected deliveries of their lines.  (Not that it matters, but this is also one of my complaints with Gone With The Wind - the kid who plays Bonnie Blue Butler is like nails on a chalkboard.)  Anyway, I wanted the kid to go through the transporter with something really awful, just to get him off the screen.  I may have been projecting a little, though, because I was alone with my kids all day today after Courtney worked a night shift last night...

Where was I?  Right - 4 flies out of 5.

Project Horror, Day 2: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

When I was about 13 years old, I checked out a book about cult films from the library.  I was in junior high school, and just beginning to become aware of the fact that there were movies out there that weren't at the theater in my town, and that lots of people might not have heard of.  The book felt like forbidden knowledge - it had sections about movies that I knew I would never watch under my parents' roof.  Movies like Cafe Flesh and Blue Velvet.  Although I've never seen it until tonight, the one movie that stayed with me the most was this one, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

What about this movie made it stick in my head?  Look at the pictures in this gallery.  Most of them are movie posters, but look at the stills from the film.  They're all striking lights and shadows, severe angles, and stark contrasts.  They are like photos of a dream.

Bonus for anybody who likes Britpop...  Take a look at this picture of Jarvis Cocker of Pulp.  Now take a look at the guy in black in this picture.  I KNOW!

Caligari was released in 1919, nearly one hundred years ago.  I've got to say, though, that unlike Dracula (which I watched yesterday), this one really withstands the test of time.  It's not in-your-face terrifying, and it's not the kind of fear that you get from watching a movie and thinking about if it really happened.  It really does play out like a dream.  You watch the characters do things that maybe don't entirely make sense, but it doesn't matter - in dream logic things don't have to make sense.

The plot:  Two friends, both in love with the same girl, decide to visit a fair which has come to town.  At the fair, Dr. Caligari exhibits Cesare, a somnambulist (I had to look it up - it means sleepwalker) who he claims has slept for 23 years in Caligari's specially built cabinet.  Cesare "knows the past and sees the future," and can answer any question put to him.  When one of the friends asks how long he will live, Cesare tells him until dawn the next morning... which is exactly right.

I loved this movie.  The sets were as much a character as any of the actors.  The scene when Cesare actually opened his eyes was creepy.  As.  Hell.  And although I can't be completely sure about this, I'd be willing to bet that this movie introduced the concept of the twist ending.  Somehow in everything I'd read, I'd never seen what the actual ending to this movie is (I didn't tell it above), so when it came, it really did catch me off guard.

Here's the other thing that I loved about this movie - it brought back another of my dreams, but this one a very good dream.  For a long time, it's been my dream job to open in Lubbock a theater like the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin.  It's nothing that I expect will ever actually happen, just one of those pleasant daydreams that gets you through the especially crappy days at the office.  I've heard that sometimes at the Alamo, they'll bring in silent films and a local band, and let the band provide accompaniment for the feature.  This movie made me want to do that.  I'm about to plunk myself squarely into the mid-90s and say that I think Rasputina or Shakespears Sister would do a knockout job with Caligari.

I give it five cabinets out of five.

Project Horror, Day 1: Dracula

I thought that the best way to kick off this month would be with an indisputable classic, Tod Browning's Dracula.  One of the rules I set for myself this month is to stick with movies that I haven't seen before, and although every person who has heard of vampires can instantly picture Bela Lugosi in his most famous role, somehow I'd never seen this one.

I had high hopes for Dracula.  Tod Browning also directed the very creepy Freaks and the famous lost film London After Midnight, so the dude knew horror.  And Universal monster films are the all-time greats!  The Mummy, The Wolfman, The Creature from the Black Lagoon!  (Shout out to my friend Scott Rieckhoff, who works for Universal!)

Do I need to tell you the plot?  I don't need to tell you the plot.  It's Dracula.  Old school vampire, charming dude, suave dresser, likes blood and the ladies.  Doesn't sparkle or brood like some emo teen with ridiculous hair.

This movie tells you right in the opening credits that it's adapted from a stage play, and it shows.  It's almost entirely dialogue-driven, and the few times when Dracula takes a victim, it's discreetly just out of frame.  Where most modern vampire movies assume that their audience already knows the general vampire rules and jump right in, this movie spends plenty of time making sure you know that vampires have to sleep in their home soil and blah blah blah...

I'm glad that I finally watched Dracula; it's a foundational film, one of those that you've just got to see.  Unfortunately, and through no fault of its own, that's also its weakness.  This movie is almost 80 years old, and even if you've never seen it, you've seen it referenced, spoofed, remade, and rehashed a dozen different ways.  Even though it was the granddaddy of 'em all, it still feels a little worn.  There's part of the movie where Van Helsing (Dutch like me!  Yay!)  is blabbing about what must be done, and you see a shadow on the wall, and you know that at the time it was probably horrifying, but today it just makes you want to groan, "Dude - Rensfield is right f'ing there!"

That's not to say that it didn't have its great parts, though.  When Dracula makes his first onscreen appearance in his castle, even though I've seen the still shot of it more times than I can count, it was fantastic!  My heart seriously jumped at Lugosi's menace and charisma.  The part where Rensfield is journeying to Castle Dracula has amazing matte scenery, something you just don't see anymore in the age of greenscreen.  And of course, one of the greatest lines in all of horror, when he's asked to join somebody for a drink - "I never drink... wine."  It's all in the delivery.

Dracula, I give you three bats out of five.  I'm glad to finally have spent some time with you.

Project Horror

Last year, my friend Steve Myles had an idea that I'm going to steal.  Every night in the month of October, I'm going to watch a different horror movie and write a little bit about it here.  I know not everybody is a fan of horror movies, but stick with me - I'm hoping this will be fun!

As I see it, the biggest challenge won't be not getting frightened.  It will be finding the time to watch a different movie every single day, especially on nights when Courtney isn't working.  But I have my project before me, and I'm dedicated to it.

I also took the suggestion of my friend Todd, who thought it would be a good idea to have theme weeks, although I changed it a little.  Having an entire week of one type of movie was too limiting, so I'm going in five day blocks.  I'm not going to give you the line-up yet; this is partly because the surprise of each day's movie will be part of the fun, and partly because I need some wiggle room in case Netflix shipping dates don't cooperate.  What I will tell you now is what the themes will be:

• October 1-5:  Classic Horror
• October 6-10:  Zombies
• October 11-15:  Foreign Horror
• October 16-20:  Occult/Supernatural
• October 21-25:  Creepy Creatures
• October 26-30:  The Evil Men Do
• October 31 (HALLOWEEN!):  Danny's Choice

First movie is tonight!