October 20th, 2015 - Darkroom (2013)

Darkroom is a mess. And not an interesting or fun mess. Just a plain old messy mess. Michelle was involved in a car accident where she killed three of her friends. For some reason, this lands her in some sort of a treatment program... if the law or courts were involved, Darkroom doesn't bother to fill you in on it. Michelle is just there, and Dr. Rachel needs to "sign off" on her recovery before she can leave. But is she even an actual doctor? If so, Darkroom doesn't bother to let you know. Dr. Rachel has two brothers - one is a little meek and maybe suffers from some sort of mental illness, and the other is an Eli Roth-esque crazy guy. They just happen to run a torture chamber on the side. So Dr. Rachel lets the patients out, and then using the promise of a job, lures them to a big mansion that houses said torture chamber. Then the three siblings torture them, because God, I guess.

Now, I'm all for religion-bashing in horror movies. But what you get in Darkroom is so weak that it hardly counts. The siblings make reference to "purging your sins," but it's basically just lip service to being a "religious crazy." Where are the wild-eyed rants about the godless state of modern society? It's like they didn't even bother to research any *actual* religious crazies. Just google the WBC and switch up a couple of words, you know? Even saying the siblings are half-baked as characters is overstating it.

September 10th, 2015 - Flesh Feast (1970)

It's hard to really even know where to begin with Flesh Feast. It's a big clunker of a movie that isn't compelling or scary in any way, and just doesn't make much sense. And there isn't enough "badness" to keep things entertaining. Director Brad Ginter struck semi-intentional gold a couple of years later with Blood Freak, but Flesh Feast doesn't have any of that film's bizarreness or strange religious overtones to help it along. There are a couple of fun moments - especially towards the end when the big bad is revealed - but to get there you need to take a long, slow road of nothing.

So here's the story as I could piece it together. But please note: Flesh Feast is the kind of film that is just very hard to pay attention to - it looks bad, has no interesting characters, and tension/horror is practically nil. You could at least hope for some cheap gore in a Blood Feast (in name) rip-off, but there's hardly any of that here. So *SPOILERS* I guess. Doing a synopsis is the easiest way for me to get through this entry. Flesh Feast is so flat and forgettable that it's hard for me to even know what to say.

July 4th, 2015 - Nurse (2013)

Nurse just kind of sucked. I don't really know what I was hoping for - Single White Female in nurse outfits? Kind of. Gratuitous nudity? Yep.  Some kitschy gore and questionable gender politics - I guess... but still the whole thing just didn't work for me. I felt like it kind of wanted to latch onto a pulpy storytelling style but stay kind of grounded at the same time - and the two tones just didn't mesh in a good way. Plus, bad acting, too many loose ends story-wise, and too much CGI gore.

Nurse is about a couple of nurses - Danni Rodgers (Katrina Bowden) is a new hire fresh out of Nursing School, and her assigned mentor, Abby Russell (Paz de la Huerta), who is a well tenured nurse but also a crazy murder. Abby is mostly well-liked by her coworkers at the hospital, but her side job is killing "married lying scum... [that] destroy unsuspecting families" - just the cheating *men* of course. In fact, before the opening credits role, we see Abby, "look[ing] like a slut" (her words, not mine) tempting a married man before she seduces him, slices his femoral artery, taunts him, and then throws him off a building. So there's no mystery here - you know right of the bat she's crazy, and enjoys killing people.

March 28th, 2015 - A Cat in the Brain (1990)

Another Lucio Fulci jam... I've come across people saying this is his masterpiece? The Italian trailer says something along the lines of (I think - I don't know Italian - but I inferred) 'what Hitchcock created, Fulci perfects." That's a bit of hyperbole, right there. But A Cat in the Brain (I like that title more) is certainly a unique vision from the horror maestro. While there is a general framework to the story, it feels like a pretty free-wheeling film. It has that unique Italian craziness you've come to expect, but feels a bit more unstructured. Like it's mostly an excuse to get a bunch of kills onscreen - and also for Fulci to take a crack at being a leading man.

The opening scene is pretty rad. Fulci is sitting at his desk writing, while the camera lingers above him and slowly zooms in on his head. You hear his voiceover, as he is writing in a notebook - just random ideas about violence:

a woman - hacked to death with an ax - her face cleaved in half
another strangled
yet another hanged
someone chopped to bits by a chainsaw
or drowned in boiling water

March 11th, 2015 - Patrick (2013)

From the box art, I thought this was called Patrick: Evil Awakens. But apparently, it's just Patrick. Which makes more sense... Patrick - although he *is* evil, never really awakens in the film. Or he's never really asleep to begin with. More like in a coma, but still alive. So that's a little misleading. But this Patrick is a remake of 1978's Patrick, so maybe it's just an easy way of differentiating the two. I had heard some good things and loved Sharni Vinson in You're Next, so I had high hopes for this one. But while Patrick has some good performances and some nice visuals/set design, the script is kind of flat and ultimately doesn't have much excitement or anything new to offer.

I haven't seen the original, but from what I can gather it's pretty similar plot-wise. The titular Patrick is a coma patient in a kind of shady, isolated hospital - while there are a half-dozen other comatose patients there, Patrick seems to be the primary focus of Dr. Roget's (Charles Dance) extreme experiments. When one of the nurses goes missing (i.e. is killed in the opening - and probably my favorite - sequence), a new nurse named Kathy (Sharni Vinson) is hired. Kathy forms a connection with Patrick - he can seemingly communicate with her using little muscle movements in his mouth. But Dr. Roget is having none of it, and continues with his "treatment" of Patrick (which is basically just shocking the hell out of him). But Patrick begins to develop not only feelings for Kathy, but also telekinetic powers. Despite being bedridden and comatose, he uses his telekinetic abilities to try and remove the obstacles (i.e. people) keeping him and Kathy from being together.

March 4th, 2015 - The Black Sleep (1956)

For the longest time I had been passing this by on my Netflix queue, for some reason swearing it was called the Black Sheep. I guess I was always distracted by the disfigured face on the box art and my mind just went to what I knew. (And this is no joke. I've scrolled past it hundreds of times, wondering why a mid-nineties Chris Farley movie would steal the title. I've yet to see the killer Sheep flick from New Zealand.) But finally I bit, looking for something a little older that wouldn't seem to terrible to my non-horror watching wife should she walk in the room. But when I saw the amazing cast (starring Basil Rathbone, and featuring Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Tor Johnson) I was pretty stoked. And it's solid - surprisingly scary/troubling for a mid-50s film, even to these jaded 2015 eyes. Almost certainly better than a "Black Sheep" would have been, at least.

It starts off in 1872 with Dr. (not chef) Gordon Ramsay (Herbert Rudley), on the eve of his hanging for a murder he did not commit. His old instructor in medical school, Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone), stops by and sneaks in a "sedative" for Ramsay to take before the execution. He takes it the next morning, and dies before he can be executed. Or does he? The drug is Cadman's "Black Sleep" - it gives the user all outward appearances of being dead, but they can be revived if an antidote is given in the next 12 hours. Cadman has arranged to take Ramsay's body for a proper burial, but in fact takes his "dead" body back to his lab where he brings him back to life. Ramsay is very grateful, but it turns out Cadman has ulterior motive - he wants Ramsay to assist him in his medical research on the brain. He warns Ramsay that his experiments are a bit unorthodox, but Ramsay obliges, thankful to be alive and working with a brilliant doctor. But the research may be a *bit* more unorthodox than Ramsay was expecting. And a bit more illegal - really, you should probably be wary of any research that requires you to go through a secret passageway to get started. I won't go into it anymore, but it gets a little nasty.

February 11th, 2015 (Trip Day 5) - The Ghost (1963)

Trip Day 5.

February 9th, 2015 (Trip Day 3) - Blood Mania (1970)

Trip Day 3.

January 23rd, 2015 - American Mary (2012)

I've had American Mary lingering on my watchlist for quite some time. I was definitely looking forward to it - I remember it being on a lot of 2012 "best of" lists. I didn't know a ton about it, other than it was about body modification and that it wasn't much of a "fun" horror film, so I had to be in the right mood for it. But I bit the bullet this weekend - and unfortunately it just didn't do it for me. It's nicely shot and well made from a technical perspective, and the body horror stuff is quite well done. It's just a little too tonally inconsistent for me. American Mary wants to exist in a grim and gritty reality, but it is populated with characters who just don't act like real people. Also, the pacing of the film is just a little too intense - I felt like there just wasn't enough room for the story to breathe. It's certainly an engaging film - one that I've thought about a lot since watching it - but ultimately I was let down.

The story is about the titular Mary (although her American-ness is in question), a very promising young surgeon attending medical school. She is having trouble paying the bills, and is looking for ways to make easy money. While at an interview at a strip club, she presents her resume saying she's spent time as an aspiring surgeon. Coincidentally, the skeezy strip-club guy needs a doctor. He's got some very bloody, injured guy he needs to keep alive (for presumably nefarious purposes), and offers Mary $5,000, no questions asked, to keep him breathing. It's obviously sketchy, but she's desperate. This is her jumping off point into the field of questionable medicine. Her next client wants some rather extreme elective cosmetic surgery that no legit doctor will perform. She does the job and is suddenly an all star in the world of body modification.

January 11th, 2015 - The Ape Man (1943)

It's hard not to feel a little bad for Bela Lugosi in The Ape Man. And not bad for the character (a scientist who is turned into a man-ape), but for Lugosi the actor. He's responsible for some of (if not the) most iconic performances in horror film history, and here he is in The Ape Man - walking around slightly hunched over with a bad teen-wolf-meets-Abe-Lincoln beard, and tussling with a guy in a gorilla suit. Although looking over his credits, you've got to wonder how close to the bottom The Ape Man actually is.

Lugosi plays Dr. James Brewster, whose experiments have "unfortunately been successful" according to his partner Dr. Randall. Why you would want to create a procedure which would turn a man into a half-ape is questionable - why you would then try it out on yourself is beyond me. But that's 40's movie science, I guess. Anyways, Brewster has been reported missing (it's front page news), when in fact he is just hiding in his secret laboratory thanks to his new ape deformity. Brewster's sister Agatha, who also happens to be a ghost hunter (?), comes from overseas and the urging of Randall to learn the horrible truth about Dr. Brewster... He looks like this!

December 17th, 2014 - The Head (1959)

The Head is probably the darkest "Head in a Pan" movie I've ever seen. I've always gotten the idea that these things are going to be campy (a la The Brain that Wouldn't Die). But here, the head of brilliant scientist Dr. Abel (I think that was his name?) just wants people to kill him, because he hates being alive as just a head. It's pretty depressing, and towards the end he proclaims "I'm just so tired" like some elderly person waiting to die. Happy Holidays!

But the medical acts against nature are two-fold in this film. Before any head in a pan business, the mad genius Dr. Brandt (I think - I need to start writing down names in my notes) has joined forces with Dr. Abel. They are looking into the science behind organ transplants (at the time this was made, a scientific reality for only 5 years - and only then with a kidney). Dr. Abel in particular has a lot on the line, for he has a heart condition that will surely be fatal if he does not get a transplant. And Dr. Abel has also invented a "z-serum" that will keep these organs living and viable - in fact, he was able to keep a dog's head alive for months! (We don't see this, thankfully.) He is also looking to help out his good friend Irene, and hunchbacked nurse who desperately wants her deformity fixed. Really, both the good Dr. Abel and the evil Dr. Brandt are the kind of doctors that just like to mess around surgically and see what they can do. The big difference? Dr. Abel only does this with consent and within the bounds of nature. Dr. Brandt? Not so much.