31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap continues below:
- Magic (1978 – Peacock) – Holy hell, the original television commercial for Magic messed me up once upon a time. I was just an innocent little kid, playing with blocks or whatever. I might have been living in a gossamer dream of make-believe 24/7. But at four years old, which personal experience now suggests was the optimal age at which to absorb any movie trailer for maximum impact, I still knew good and damned well that ventriloquist’s dummies were not supposed to look at the camera with no operator in sight and talk by themselves. That image, sinister and patently wrong, seared itself into my unconscious mind and must’ve lingered there for over forty years, subtly preventing me from considering watching Magic until well AFTER I’d already experienced legitimate nightmares like, say, Wolf Creek, or Audition, or Inside. With so much preamble and water under the bridge, imagine my, well, surprise to find, in Magic, not a final boss I’d been inadvertently building up for decades but a fairly genteel, made for TV-style romantic melodrama shot through with creepy and obsessive undertones. The horror movie trailer is a lost art, I tell ya. An impossibly young Anthony Hopkins impresses as a talented but troubled apprentice magician whose switch to ventriloquism – and immediate amazing facility with the art, as channeled through “Fats”, his faux-Vaudevillian insult comic puppet – lights a rocket ship under his burgeoning career. Flustered, the Hopkins character soon follows that age-old path undertaken by so many of us who were ill-equipped to handle meteoric fame, fleeing the Big Apple with his puppet wingman in tow for a secluded rural rental cabin upstate not coincidentally owned by high school flame Ann-Margaret. What follows is a low key but involving mental turf war between the two aspects of the magician’s evolving, tectonic plate-level split personality, as Fats asserts increasing dominance over his meek, well-intentioned straight man. Margaret plays the unwitting pawn and always welcome character actors Ed Lauter, as her insufficiently suspicious husband, and, especially, Burgess Meredith, as the magician’s cigar-chomping old-Hollywood agent, are colorful collateral damage. Magic plays cards close to its chest on the true nature of its central relationship – which isn’t between Margaret and the magician at all, but, rather, between ventriloquist and dummy – though its power dynamics are rarely in question, and is deliberate in its appraisal of Fats in a way that awful, long-ago commercial simply didn’t have time for. When the moment of truth finally arrives, the fact that it has the power to surprise is a tribute to Hopkins, whose committed performance has by then turned the magician into not just a sympathetic but a borderline-tragic figure by allowing his underlying tenderness and inner conflict room to co-mingle with ever-encroaching madness.
- Megan (2022 – Prime) – In a nod to the generally awful times in which we live, I’ll state for the record that I am greatly unsettled by the disruptive, even destructive, potential of applied artificial intelligence. It does not strain credibility to me at all that granting a computer autonomy of thought might eventually lead to unintended, perhaps deadly, consequences. While we’re in a confessional mood, I’ll also assert that I am neither ready to be nor remotely interested in being a single parent. Like, ever. Now, though these two states would appear on the surface to be unrelated, their unlikely convergence places me firmly in the unsuspecting target audience for Blumhouse’s latest poisoned PG-13 confection, Megan, the story of an A.I.-abetted robot doll that, through its programmed protective instincts toward a freshly and painfully minted orphan child, develops first sentience and then a decidedly murderous disposition in short order. Allison Williams, who is fast building an impressive second act in mass-market horror as an embodiment of WASP-y suburban duality, plays a brilliant A.I. scientist professionally wasted in product development at a chincy toy company who must become her 9-year-old niece’s legal guardian when her sister and brother-in-law are killed in a tragic accident. Grieving for her sister, frustrated by petty office politics, the loss of her former single life, and her inability to connect with the little girl, and overwhelmed by the responsibilities of whiplash parenthood, Williams pours herself into the creation of what will become her crowning achievement, Megan, an artificially intelligent child’s doll who, unsurprisingly, becomes an instant sensation in the toy world while, behind the scenes, causing just as many and more serious problems as she solves. Sensing only its worst possibilities, I admittedly came to Megan resistant, expecting a rapid, practically unimpeded descent into goofiness. Perhaps I’d been conditioned for disappointment by the repeated calls of internet morons for an immediate Megan vs. Chucky crossover sequel and all the stale cheese that implies. But the avalanche of good notices finally swayed me, and I have to say the film rewarded my open-mindedness (of sorts) immediately. By the time the freefall I’d been expecting inevitably began in the movie’s final reel, I was far too involved in the push-pull between Megan and her creator for the trust and figurative soul of the little girl to care. Megan overachieves at most every turn. It is far more intelligent, insightful, and engaging than it needs, or, frankly, has any right or reason to be. What an awful doll, truly. Maybe “Fats” from Magic is her father?
- Night of the Demons (1988 – Shudder) – Toxic exposure to some 118 years of The Walking Dead and its seven dwarven offshoots has by now pretty much borne out the idea that zombies are yesterday’s news, in no small part because they’re just too predictable. They’ve kinda been done to death, if you’ll pardon the pun. For some 101-proof bugnuts fun and games, I suggest you consider partying with demons instead. Whether of the classic Italian theater-demolishing variety, of aforementioned backwoods Tennessean extraction, or some still to-be-mentioned-here unmentionables from the dusty dirt roads of rural Argentina, they are guaranteed to turn your evening up until the dial spins off in exhaustion. Just ask the gaggle of horny high school revelers from ‘80s perennial Night of the Demons, or at least what’s left of them, who admirably put aside ingrained class distinctions, implied societal pressure, and any pretense of common sense to gather for a Halloween party at a supposedly haunted local funeral home. From the moment goth mistress of ceremonies Angela offers up an authentic seance as her preferred method of pepping up the listless proceedings, the mayhem comes thick, heavy, and in angular waves of, ahem, excess personality. You will believe a black man can survive a horror movie…and just wait until you get a load of Linnea Quigley’s famous “disappearing lipstick” trick. As the night progresses, the partygoers are neatly separated into teams of pedestrian vs. possessed, with the former desperate to escape the increasingly Machiavellian confines of this slaughterhouse, in which the latter await them around seemingly every corner. Night of the Demons is a longstanding favorite of genre fans for a reason. It delivers most everything it promises, both explicit and implicit, and is practically imbued with the spirit of Halloween. To illustrate, I’ll spoil one particularly great visual joke that appears out of left field when a fresh gravestone materializes at the head of a delinquent who has just fallen to his death and been impaled on one of those splintered wooden stakes that always seem to litter backyards in horror movies: “Sal Romero, Born: December 6, 1970, Died: Tonight”. In keeping with this time when horror was somehow both more sordid and more innocent, more reverent and more rollicking – a time when maybe zombies weren’t old hat at all – I’ve got to doubt that dear departed Sal’s last name was purely coincidental either.
- Nightmare Before Christmas (1993 – Theater) – In a quintessential “get off my lawn” moment even he was self-aware and savvy enough to identify as such, Tim Burton recently did his part to extinguish the sort of reboot talk, this time pointed toward his snowcapped evergreen stop-motion miracle The Nightmare Before Christmas, that tends to inevitably ooze out of Hollywood and swirl around any notable intellectual property left alone too long to ferment. I couldn’t be happier with these developments, of course. Away with you, vultures, and leave us to our discs, streaming options, and sweet, sweet memories. Some films simply cannot be improved upon. 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of our first enchanted descent into the fantastical holiday hamlet of Halloween-Town, and its ghoulish but good-hearted figurehead Jack Skellington’s Quixotic quest to wrest operational control of Christmas from Santa Claus for the season. What better end to my own festival than to catch it (yet again) on the big screen? Like all the best fantasies and/or Tim Burton productions, each subsequent visit to these “Holiday Worlds of Old” reveals something new. Beginning with its original theatrical run, I personally have seen The Nightmare Before Christmas so many times – in so many formats that ended up feeling huge despite their actual size, in so many moods that invariably melted into bliss by its end – that I can solely focus on picking out all the little details in the margins and still have a magnificent time. The imagination on display here is spectacular, the songs and score by Danny Elfman top notch. The movie is easy and breezy, invigorating, just the right bit of twisted, and lovely to its core. Few moments in all of filmdom reliably grab my attention and stir my soul like the martial strum of opening number “This is Halloween”. I would’ve loved to name my dog Zero, back in the days before Billy Corgan essentially trademarked the word for black T-shirt ubiquity. In Zero’s absence, my spirit animal is definitely the Clown with the Tear-Away Face. JACK + SALLY 4EVER.
- Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984 – Blu-Ray) – Could it be true, after all these years of influence, that Wes Craven’s seminal left-field Slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street is actually underrated? I don’t see how, either, but here we are. You still hear emeritus mention of Freddy Krueger, infamous quip-slinging butcher of the great unconscious, sometimes, in certain circles, but seldom of the film that spawned him. The film series, sure. Fellow chroniclers do talk about part 2 as the LGBTQ touchstone it inadvertently became, or part 3 as the creative high water mark, part 4 as the moneymaker, part 6 as the low point by whatever your chosen metric, New Nightmare as the outstanding, self-aware reinvention, and the 2010 abomination as proof that cinematic rebirths often aren’t what they’re cracked up to be…but all too rarely the original. Remove part 3 and New Nightmare (and thus Craven’s fingerprints altogether) from the equation, and the original movie is better than the remaining franchise combined. Why should it be an afterthought? I’ve perceived a strange reluctance to discuss A Nightmare on Elm Street, much of which may have to do with the nature of the Krueger character – a charismatic yet objectively vile child murderer burned alive by a mob of vigilante parents after escaping conventional justice on a technicality, who returns to stalk the children of his executioners where they are most vulnerable…in their dreams – and the arguably unfortunate ways he has evolved over the years. No matter the process by which Krueger, the disfigured predator with knives for fingers, was, in an ironic twist, figuratively declawed and transformed from authentic persona non grata into a crowd-pleasing, homicidal Borscht Belt comedian with great makeup, he didn’t start out that way. He arguably wasn’t even the star of his own movie, which was all the better for that decision. Craven’s initial spark of inspiration had the touch of genius, extrapolating from a news article he’d read about a spate of incidents in which otherwise healthy SoCal teenagers had mysteriously died in their sleep, then filling in the blanks in a way simultaneously grounded and fantastical. A Nightmare on Elm Street is the story not of Krueger but of his nemesis Nancy Thompson, a suburban high schooler who discovers that she shares a terrifying common nightmare with her tight circle of friends, then must figure out how to fight back against its resident bogeyman when they begin dying at his razor-gloved hand. Taking inspiration from a local vagrant who used to scare him as a kid, Craven unwittingly created the next evolution of the Slasher villain in Freddy, whose original incarnation was a heretofore unheard of combination of personality and legitimate menace. His motives, actions, and noxious backstory made Krueger a one-of-a-kind character, and B-movie everyman Robert Englund inhabited the role so thoroughly, from his basso profundo voice to his off-kilter posture to his shambling gait to his ghoulish cackle, that he essentially cornered the market on who could effectively play him. Latter day Elm Street sequels adhered to a time-tested formula that coalesced around Krueger from the moment he first received top billing, turning the original’s tooth and nail mystery into a kind of neutered funhouse haunted by a softened, no less murderous yet somehow more approachable M.C. seemingly forever in search of his next punchline. The Craven original brooks none of that. It is grimy and sensuous, brutal and unsettled, uncomfortably intimate, oversaturated in the light of day but dimly lit in the boiler rooms and dark corridors that comprise the dreamscape battleground. Craven’s careful writing and Heather Langenkamp’s ferociously thoughtful performance conspire to make Nancy a heroine for the ages, the kind of particularly formidable opponent that should have redefined the “final girl” concept for years but didn’t quite. She’ll have to settle for being the best. So will A Nightmare on Elm Street, the unequivocal best Slasher of the decade and easy top five of all time. The powers that be may have wrested control of Freddy in their quest for the bottom line and turned him from a devil into a clown, but on the three occasions Craven held the reins, he was a true monster unbound except by the limits of imagination, and impossible to overlook. It’s an interesting exercise to imagine a seven-movie series derived from Craven’s singular vision for Krueger instead of just the one we were so fortunate to get. The marketplace obviously had other ideas and priorities. One wonders, gaming it out to its logical end, if Freddy would’ve even survived that long.
- Nope (2022 – Prime) – It’s often said that successful young musicians had years to write their first album, but a comparatively small window for follow-ups, leaving aside the added pressures and perils of sudden, disorienting celebrity that tend to work against the process. That thought occurred to me about 20 minutes into Nope, the overwrought third feature by Jordan Peele, beloved sketch comedian turned unlikely overnight sensation as a horror auteur, and lingered there throughout its remaining runtime. In the ‘90s Grunge terms that I know flow oh so naturally from such a tortured analogy, that would make Nope Peele’s Tiny Music, or Vitalogy, an overly ambitious twist on the established sound that landed comparatively flat despite having its moments. Those albums have their fans, obviously, but masterpieces they are not. Neither is Nope, which, beyond its admittedly spectacular title, on which fanboy chatter coasted for months before opening weekend, was shrouded in secrecy to the point where I knew next to nothing about it ahead of my initial screening. Having now seen it, I feel like I still have questions, despite my troubling inability to articulate them. An eccentric, highly specific alien invasion movie set in the dusty scrub brush of the badlands out past Los Angeles, Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya, of Peele’s breakout Get Out, and high energy character actress Keke Palmer as fractious siblings whose struggle to keep their late father’s “Hollywood horses for hire” business afloat is complicated by the appearance on their property of various mysteries, portents, and, finally, unexpected visitors from above. An odd but solid cast is rounded out by Brandon Perea as a slacker electronics salesman, The Walking Dead’s Steven Yuen as the wealthy proprietor of a Wild West theme park, and the always welcome Michael Wincott, of The Crow and Strange Days, among others, as a conspiracy-minded Director of Photography who walks off the set of his and Kaluuya’s latest movie for a chance to prove that aliens are real. A heady but remote mash-up of horror and sci-fi elements shot through with family drama fireworks and splashes of social anthropology, Nope follows this ad hoc Loser’s Club down the rabbit hole and into some increasingly deep sh*t, both literally, and thanks to its writer/director, metaphorically. Peele thinks too big against an impressive canvas for me to dismiss his movie outright, and, to be fair, I was never tempted. The problem for me was that it was perhaps too cerebral, despite what I sensed were pretensions and protestations to the contrary. Cool customer Kaluuya and live wire Palmer make convincing siblings, if not quite horror protagonists, and Peele time and again prioritizes unpredictability and character beats over narrative momentum, or on occasion, coherence. Even while fleeing frenetic flying saucer fire on horseback, I never believed the Kaluuya character quite believed he was in danger, so I didn’t either. I kept waiting for the definitive turning point where Nope would shift from merely clever and intriguing into actively involving, but it never came.
- Prowler, The (1981 – Shudder) – Anyone laboring under the widespread if understandable misconception that the Slasher genre begins and ends with its Mount Rushmore heads (left to right – Messers J. Voorhees, M. Myers, F. Krueger, and, um, L. Face) is well advised to dig at least a little deeper before passing judgment or moving on. I can personally envision using the 31 DAEs going forward as a yearly excuse to check out and/or reacquaint myself with some of the many, many, MANY B-tier Slasher titles that once competed so fiercely for the scraps from the Voorhees family dinner table. My recent happy introduction to underseen splat-tacular The Prowler, for example, ended up confirming it, alongside the tremendous My Bloody Valentine and aforementioned Friday the 13th Part 2 and House on Sorority Row, as a true standout among that unruly lot. A sleepy Northern town prepares for the Pritcher College Class of 1980 formal dance, uneasily aware that the date marks the anniversary of an infamous Lover’s Lane massacre committed by a lovelorn, heartbroken soldier just returned from World War II. Now, as anyone who’s ever seen a Slasher knows, the sins of the past never stay there, and, sure enough, with our festivities fast approaching, a mysterious masked prowler armed to the teeth and dressed head to toe in infantryman finery appears (returns?) and begins dispatching the sisters of the campus’ most prominent sorority, plus their plus-ones. Tom Savini’s gore effects get all the hype here, and rightfully so, as, however under the radar, this is still some of the best work of his remarkable career. Particularly noteworthy are his set pieces in and around water – the swimming pool, and, oh yes, you’d better believe the shower – but everything carries a satisfyingly blunt and/or nasty edge. Joseph Zito assumes directorial duties in a dry run for his headline collaboration with Savini a few years later in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, and it’s impressive how sure his hand is, how defiantly not lazy, how he doesn’t skimp on scene setting or brief attempts at characterization when he has the bandwidth, and, once the G.I. is let out of his bottle, how effective the isolated sequences of suspense are, how brutal (and hand-to-hand) the individual moments of conflict. The obligatory climactic reveal of the G.I.’s identity is, in retrospect, head slappingly obvious, but not only doesn’t it matter in the long run, I was too engrossed by the unfolding endgame – complete with another close encounter between the heroine in hiding and an overly healthy rat (what WAS it about 1981 anyway?) – to be offended. The Prowler isn’t Rushmore-worthy, perhaps because of its lack of excess personality, perhaps because no room was included for a sequel, but this is still superior stuff.
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