runningscared

Movie: Carnival of Souls (1962), directed by Herk Harvey

Watched on: HBO Max

Ran: 5.76 miles, 9’46”/mile, 56:18 (slow recovery run)

You know the whole thing about Turkey Burnout, right? Like, Thanksgiving dinner is triple-thumbs-up Grade-A awesome, and Thanksgiving leftovers are somehow even better—for maybe the first couple of days. By about the third day in, though, the very notion of eating any more turkey makes you want to spatchcock yourself, drag your splayed carcass into a preheated oven, and let the gods gnaw on your wings ’n’ drumsticks. Well, watching ThanksKilling definitely filled me with a little too much turkey, if you catch my drift, so I thought tonight I should chow down on a classic—ideally something, you know, good. So I loaded up Carnival of Souls, which I hadn’t seen for ages and thought might make for a nice palate-cleanser.

Mary Henry isn’t exactly what you’d call a “people person,” so who knows what she’s doing in a car with a couple of drag racers? Maybe she considers it a vague relief when their car plunges off a bridge into the river. In any case, the local authorities haven’t yet recovered the vehicle when Mary emerges from the water three hours later, with no memory of the accident. Just one of those things, I guess. And no time to dwell on trivial things like mysteriously surviving a deadly crash—it’s time to bail on this one-horse town forever and start her glamorous new job as a church organist in Salt Lake City! So she packs up her car and hits the road.

Unfortunately, Mary’s being haunted by visions of a wild-eyed powdery-looking dude in dire need of a tan, a good dandruff shampoo, and probably a pulse. He appears floating outside her car window going 60, standing in the middle of the highway, hovering outside her 2nd-floor boarding house window, etc.… and of course no one else ever sees him. Furthermore, she’s experiencing weird spells of seeming nonexistence, where nothing in the world makes a sound and no one seems to see or hear her. Sounds like she’s got enough on her plate without also having to contend with the unwelcome attentions of the guy across the hall, as well as her weird fixation on the abandoned carnival just outside of town. Does it have anything to do with her utter lack of desire for human companionship and her (gasp!) SECULAR ATTITUDE toward her church gig?

Poor Mary’s just trying to get on with her solitary lifestyle, but the increasing terror of being stalked by Corpsey Dude and occasionally fading from existence is making that tricky. She even tries to stomach a date with her loathsome and leering neighbor just to have some protection nearby, but that goes about as well as you’d expect, and eventually she winds up drawn back to the carnival for the creepy nightmare climax. Overall, Carnival of Souls feels a little like a super-long Twilight Zone episode, except I doubt Rod Serling would ever have produced such a predictable and unsatisfying ending. Without explicitly spoiling anything, I’ll just say that once you’re maybe ten minutes in, what you think is going on is pretty much exactly what’s going on.

Ultimately, though, maybe it’s not such a big deal, since Carnival of Souls isn’t really about the narrative—it’s about the atmosphere. Corpsey Dude is at least Freak Factor 11, and the nonexistence sequences are straight out of your most uncomfortable anxiety dreams. The cinematography is surprisingly effective—the starkness of the black and white makes everything a nightmare, and some of the shots (particularly in the carnival itself) are gorgeously disturbing. Even some of the scene transitions feel like those dreams when you suddenly find yourself impossibly elsewhere but it seems natural enough at the time.

Beyond the nightmare feel, to me the real horror in Carnival of Souls is Mary’s plight as society keeps trying to cast her in roles she’s not interested in playing. There’s something charmingly old-fashioned about all the community uproar over Mary’s indifference to the church and her lack of desire for a husband, but it’s not so alien that we don’t feel her claustrophobia at the pressure to sacrifice her preferences for her safety. It’s dreadful to see Mary on a date with her actual stalker just so she’s not alone and at the mercy of her spectral stalker. (Personally, given that date, I think she’d be better off with Corpsey Dude.) I’d actually be very interested in seeing a modern remake—not the reportedly execrable 1998 one, which had almost nothing in common with the original beyond the title—that was a more explicitly feminist reading of the original plot.

While it’s not the scariest movie out there, I do like Carnival of Souls, though I feel some of the fanboy worship for it might be a bit overblown. If you want a general creepfest that’s very much of its time and you aren’t much bothered by stories in which not a lot really happens, give it a whirl, especially if you’re a fan of low-key surreal cinematography. It’s definitely not a turkey—although, apropos of nothing, I feel it’s worth noting that when the film was over, HBO Max suggested “more like this” and the first movie listed was Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. Make of that what you will.

feeling: nonexistent

Movie: ThanksKilling (2009), directed by Jordan Downey

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.03 miles, 9’37”/mile, 01:07:43 (slow recovery run)

You rolled your eyes at Halloween on Halloween… You gazed in heavy-lidded ennui at Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th… But nothing could prepare you for the shocking lack of creative initiative that is… ThanksKilling on Thanksgiving: (Pilgrim) Hat Trick! Yes, folks, if you thought I was going to come up with something original or clever to watch after forcing down Field Roast en croûte, Parker House rolls, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted rainbow carrots with shiitake mushrooms and Brussels sprouts, Thanksgiving vegan slurry (comprising stuffing, macaroni and cheese, cranberries, and mushroom gravy), and butterscotch cinnamon pie with a ginger snap crust, you’re even dozier than I was, and I was in a carb coma so deep it was impractical to measure it in fathoms.

And yet, somehow I still dragged my carcass onto the treadmill and got seven miles under my straining belt. How, you ask? Well, I can’t be certain, but I suspect the fundamental badness of ThanksKilling should claim at least partial credit for keeping me in a perpetual state of disbelief as to just what the hell I was looking at. When I read the description on Amazon Prime—“a homicidal turkey axes off college kids during Thanksgiving break”—I knew I wasn’t exactly in for a Kurosawa marathon. But what I was not prepared for was that the aforementioned homicidal turkey TALKS. Indeed, he swears a blue streak and cracks dumb one-liners. It’s a whole thing.

Let’s break down ThanksKilling like my digestive tract is breaking down all those starches into simple sugars to make my pancreas freak out: it starts, simply enough, with naked pilgrim boobs. The historical-times pilgrim lady to whom they belong is running from a demonic turkey, who kills her with a tomahawk. Cut to the present day, and five college students—two or three of whom probably shouldn’t have graduated middle school—are carpooling back to their home town for Thanksgiving. But the car breaks down, so they have to camp out for the night, which is when Darren (“the nerd”) tells them the campfire story of a demonic turkey summoned forth by Native American magic to kill as many white people as possible every 500-odd years. That seems like a really long time between vengeance-slaughters, but far be it from me to question the wisdom of the ancients.

You will be gobsmacked to learn, I am sure, that tonight is the night of the turkey’s semimillennial rampage, and from that point on, ThanksKilling has all the typical elements of your standard homicidal talking turkey story: turkey taunts kids in the woods; turkey shoots guy in the head and steals his car; turkey murders kids’ parents; turkey rapes college girl before breaking her neck; turkey fools local sheriff by wearing Groucho glasses; turkey cuts off sheriff’s face and wears it as an impenetrable disguise; etc. etc. etc. In other words, no big surprises. Meanwhile, our remaining carpool heroes are working to crack the secret to killing the invincible magic turkey, there’s a subplot with a hermit with a shotgun who wants to avenge the death of his dog, and, predictably enough, a convenient container of radioactive waste figures heavily in the climax.

ThanksKilling was thrown together for a few thousand bucks by literal college kids, and it shows: the acting is basically college students reading lines, the script is full of running JonBenét Ramsey gags and references to ghost-riding the whip, and the effects are scraped together from whatever they could find at Family Dollar—the exception being the turkey puppet, which is actually pretty dope. ThanksKilling isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen—not by a LONG shot—but it’s among the worst I’ve watched since starting this whole Running Scared nonsense, which is saying something. And therein lies a dilemma, and an updated Zen koan: if a film is bad in the woods and nobody is around to watch it, does it still suck? Or, more to the point, if a film is bad on purpose and everybody expects and wants it to be, is it still a bad film?

So while I acknowledge that ThanksKilling is probably an objectively worse movie than, say, Can’t Take It Back (which I gave my lowest rating to date), intent matters, as does budget and general access to resources. Furthermore, ThanksKilling was honestly better than the other lowest-rated movie, Verotika, which not only made less narrative sense and had about equally poor acting, effects, and general production value, but also clearly TRIED TO BE GOOD and, worse yet, thought it had succeeded.

To bottom-line it for you, though, I wouldn’t expect many people to think ThanksKilling is fun to watch unless they’re dedicated schlock fans or either stoned or too full of gravy and pie to change the channel. Am I glad I watched it? Sure. Will I watch it again? Probably not, but never say never.

Will I watch the sequel? Tune in next Thanksgiving to find out.

feeling: full

Movie: All Cheerleaders Die (2013), directed by Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.28 miles, 9’28”/mile, 01:08:58 (slow recovery run)

It’s a funny thing about long-distance running: when it’s just me, the rhythm of my stride, and the miles unspooling beneath my feet, a sort of meditative trance can settle upon me like a blanket of fresh-fallen snow. The concerns of the physical plane recede into the groove my cadence is carving into the ground beneath me, everything becomes quiet and clear, and that’s when the eternal questions start to pass through my head on their way to forevermore. Like, how best are we to spend our finite and fleeting minutes on this earth? And, is death the end, or just the beginning? All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

And, most importantly, what would happen if Lucky McKee threw Bring It On and The Craft in a Vitamix, tossed in a sprig of Heathers, and blended the absolute living hell out of it?

Luckily for me, tonight’s flick was All Cheerleaders Die, so at least I finally have the answer to that last one. To be clear, I’m talking about the 2013 remake, not the original 2001 film that McKee and Chris Sivertson made fresh out of college, which I’ve yet to see because it went straight to video and is pretty tough to find these days. McKee and Sivertson called for a redo once they’d each had some more experience at the whole filmmaking thing. Let’s take a peek, shall we?

It’s a few days before her senior year, and Mäddy has never been the cheerleader type (as if the umlaut doesn’t tip you off), so no one understands why she’s trying out for the squad—least of all her Wiccan ex-girlfriend Leena, still heartbroken and stalkery. But Mäddy has a makeover, a new wardrobe, and serious gymnastics chops, so she makes the cut and ingratiates herself with the In Crowd. Turns out she’s on a secret mission to wreck the cheerleaders’ and football team’s senior year from the inside—does this have something to do with the accidental death of Lexi, the squad captain, three months ago? After all, Lexi’s boyfriend Terry (the team captain) sure hooked up with her best friend Tracy in a hurry.

Anyway, Mäddy’s doing a bang-up job with the sabotage; she convinces Tracy that Terry’s been cheating on her, and even manages to seduce Tracy at the end-of-summer post-rally cheerleaders ’n’ football players blowout held at the local cemetery. This doesn’t go over super-well with Terry, who loses his temper, punches Tracy in the face, and winds up running Mäddy, Tracy, and two other cheerleaders off a cliff in a road rage car chase and then fleeing the scene. Mäddy’s ex Leena, still in stalker mode, pulls the bodies from the water and uses Magic Rainbow Stones™ to raise them all from the dead.

So now we’ve got four undead cheerleaders walking around school with glowing rocks in their bodies, and they’re up for vengeance, and also they’re super strong but kinda need to keep feeding on fresh human blood. Oh, and two of them, sisters Hanna and Martha, have switched bodies Freaky Friday-style, because there’s a whole B-story about Hanna being in love with Martha’s boyfriend. And also there’s sort of a gestalt hive thing going on where they all feel it when any of them is feeding, hurting, or, uh, gettin’ intimate. But the thing is, they’re not being very subtle about any of this, so even the football players start figuring out the rules of the game. When Terry steals the rest of Leena’s magic stones to use against them, who’s finally coming out on top—especially when Mäddy’s secret ulterior motives turn the squad against her?

Okay, so, All Cheerleaders Die is far from a perfect movie. The dialogue, while reminiscent of the sort of smart, elevated version of teenspeak that we’ve seen in Clueless, Bring It On, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV, doesn’t quite measure up to that degree of snappiness. The special effects aren’t all that special, certainly where the CGI is concerned (the floating blood is especially fake-looking), but I get the sense that’s sort of the joke, which is awfully convenient when you think about it. Pretty much any scene in which the magic stones are glowing Lite Brite colors and flying around is sorta cringeworthy on that front, especially in the climax.

And speaking of that scene, I honestly could have done without the cheesy musical reference to the Nazi face-melting scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark—I get it, we’re not supposed to be taking this movie seriously because the people who made it sure didn’t, but I gotta say, I was emotionally invested in the story at that point, and one dumb joke took me right out of it. That kind of gets to the heart of why All Cheerleaders Die doesn’t quite live up to its promise or its premise: it’s sort of a parody and sort of an homage, but it never really quite makes up its mind. As a result, there’s a fair bit of empathetic whiplash when you start caring about something or someone and then sense that the film actually wants you to be making fun of it, but not really, but definitely yes (while shaking its head no).

But yes (definitely, definitely yes), I liked All Cheerleaders Die despite its flaws. It’s got a weirdly fresh vibe for a semi-parody of what came before, its central love story is effective and affecting (not to mention refreshingly non-heteronormative), and the crazy tonal shifts between, say, Disney-style goofy body switching and truly horrifying graphic violence are all part of the game. Give it a go, especially if you’re a fan of both horror flicks and the more pedestrian feel-good teen movies from which this mash-up originates.

That’s… that’s not just me, is it?…

feeling: zen

Movie: Jason X (2001), directed by Jim Isaac

Watched on: HBO Max

Ran: 7.52 miles, 9’29”/mile, 01:11:23 (slow recovery run)

Friends, sometimes you just want to watch something stupid… and I mean brick-stupid. Not necessarily bad, mind you, though in film the two often go hand in hand—and yes, there are times when you want to watch something bad. But right now I’m not talking about those times. I’m talking about when one feels a deep, unrelenting itch to see some seriously ill-conceived idiocy, if only to reaffirm the fundamental absurdity of this human experience we’ve shaped for ourselves. And at times like those, I either go see a Beckett play, or I reach for a big bowl of popcorn and the panacea that is Jason X.

Jason X, you see, is a film that EXCELS at being stupid. It is a masterpiece of fatuity, Michelangelo’s Pietà if Michelangelo’s whole deal had been carving beautiful statues out of huge blocks of pure dumb. It is, to put it mildly, GLORIOUS.

Let me break it down for you: in the original franchise continuity there had already been nine, count ‘em, NINE Friday the 13th movies, the two most recent being Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. So when resurrecting everyone’s favorite unstoppable killer for one more spree, the filmmakers asked one all-important question: once you’ve already freed Jason Voorhees from the environs of Camp Crystal Lake and sent him first to Manhattan and then, perhaps redundantly, to Hell, where can you send him next? Space. The answer is space.

Also, the future.

In space.

And thus, Jason X was born!

The story makes perfect sense: since no one’s been able to keep Jason dead, scientists at the Crystal Lake Research Facility decide to cryogenically freeze him instead. Naturally, a whole lotta people die in order to make this happen, but one of the scientists, Rowan, manages to lure Jason into a cryo chamber and start the freezing process. He stabs her through the glass just before he freezes, and some of the super-freezy cryo gas comes through the stab-hole and freezes Rowan, too. So Rowan remains stabbed and frozen outside Jason’s cryo tube for like 400 years, as apparently that’s how super-freezy cryo gas works and also no one bothered to go to the facility or follow up on any of the dozen-plus dead people, etc. because that’s totally a thing that would happen.

Cut to the year 2455: Earth has long been abandoned because it’s become too polluted to sustain life. Humanity’s fled this garbage heap and started a NEW garbage heap on Earth 2 (seriously, they named it that), and the only people who visit Earth Classic anymore are archaeology classes on field trips—one of which has just found Jason and Rowan still frozen, despite a dead and abandoned planet probably not having a working electrical grid to power the cryo tubes and Rowan isn’t even in one anyway BUT I DIGRESS. The students bring Jason and Rowan on board their ship, thaw out Rowan and heal her stab wound—it’s no biggie, they just routinely reattached some dude’s arm, it’s THE FUTURE after all—and then laugh at her primitive grasp of science as she warns them all that no matter how dead he may look (spoiler: he looks plenty dead, it’s gross), Jason’s about to kill them all.

Predictably, she’s right, and Jason goes on Baby’s First Space Rampage while Rowan tries to assist the crew and space marines with what she knows about the phenomenon that is Jason Voorhees. (Think Aliens with Rowan as Ripley.) It’s impossible to spoil the “surprise twist” since it was in the previews and ON THE DANG POSTER, so basically once Jason is cut to ribbons by the adorable ass-kicking lovebot KM-14, the ship’s nanotech rebuilds him as a sleek futuristic Jason with upgrades and, yeah. Like I may have mentioned once or twice, it’s dumb.

The body count is INSANE, since Jason has to tear through TWO military squadrons (one terrestrial and one in space, natch), as well as everyone else he encounters. Most of these 20-odd kills are therefore of the quick and practical variety, but Jason does manage to offer up two of the more entertaining onscreen deaths in the entire franchise, namely 1) submerging someone’s head in liquid nitrogen for a few seconds and them smashing it against the countertop, and 2) impaling someone on a giant industrial upward-pointing drill bit so that the corpse slowly rotates as gravity pulls it downward. Be warned: there’s plenty of CGI, which I guess I should consider sacrilegious in a Friday the 13th flick, but honestly it felt pretty at-home in a movie like this.

The low-rent Canadian cast performs admirably, the characters are mostly simple but reasonably engaging (the android being the most likable character should be a red flag, and yet it works here), and overall, transplanting Jason into space works far better than it has any right to. If you can embrace the stupidity, Jason X is super-entertaining. I mean, I was 30 when I first saw it, and it made me SO ANGRY, people. These days? I just flat-out love it. Maybe it’s because I’ve mellowed, or maybe it’s because the background radiation of stupidity on this planet has risen exponentially over the past, oh, four years or so (hmmmm…) and Jason X’s now pales in comparison.

Whatever the reason, I will happily watch Jason X on a loop until what’s left of my brain withers and dies. If you decide to join me, keep an eye peeled for a David Cronenberg cameo, and enjoy your last chance to see Kane Hodder behind the hockey mask.

feeling: stupid

Movie: Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000), directed by John Ottman

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.44 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:10:24 (slow recovery run)

So the other day I was saying to myself, “Self,” I said, “you really aren’t watching enough sequels these days.” Running Scared currently has a grand total of TWO sequels in its review list—and one of those I only watched because I didn’t know it was a sequel. Not that I have anything against sequels! They are, after all, one of our richest sources of the raw ore from which cinematic snark is refined. But it does seem weird to write about a sequel here if I haven’t already written about its original.

Well, good news: since I watched Urban Legend a few weeks back, I harbored no such qualms about revisiting Urban Legends: Final Cut during tonight’s pathetically slow recovery run! Yes, apparently they’d hoped to turn one of my favorite not-especially-great horror flicks into a franchise in which each mostly-standalone film would continue the theme of grisly deaths patterned after urban legends—hence this outing’s unwieldy title and sketchy connection to the storyline of the original. Indeed, the first time I saw UL:FC I was uncertain whether it even WAS a sequel until the films’ single shared character showed up ten minutes in.

This time around, we’re at Alpine University’s film school, where daughter-of-an-Oscar-winner Amy Mayfield is struggling to come up with a script for her thesis project, which will also be her entry for the prestigious Hitchcock Awards. (The Hitchcock is a big deal: the winner is virtually guaranteed a Hollywood career, so the competition among the seniors is fierce.) One night, Amy hitches a ride home with a security guard named Reese—yup, THAT Reese!—who tells Amy about how she’d been head of security when the urban legends killer offed all those people at Pendleton. Amy decides her Hitchcock entry will be a horror film loosely based on the Pendleton murders. So we’re watching a sequel to a movie about an urban legends killer in which they’re making a movie about an urban legends killer. Got it?

But all is not well on the Alpine campus; Amy’s crush Travis, a filmmaking wunderkind, has allegedly killed himself after receiving an unthinkable C- on his thesis film. And Amy’s own shoot isn’t going so great, because everyone working on it seems to vanish or die: her lead actress Sandra disappears but is captured on film in an uncharacteristically believable death scene, her cinematographer is bludgeoned to death with his own camera lens, her two visual effects wonks are electrocuted on set, etc. A mysterious figure in a fencing mask seems to be behind it all, and just to make things weirder, Travis’s identical twin Trevor is lurking around on campus secretly trying to solve what he insists must be Travis’s murder. Can Amy and Trevor crack the case before she runs out of cast and crew? Her future film prospects (and, I guess, some lives) hang in the balance.

(By the way, that means this is actually a sequel to a movie about an urban legends killer in which they’re trying to make a movie about an urban legends killer while being killed off by an urban legends killer. But who’s counting?)

I will make this plain: no matter how many times UL:FC invokes his name and work, Hitchcock it most certainly ain’t. It labors under the burden of an overly large cast, which contains too many generic white dudes to try to keep track of—and just to add insult to injury, when one of them dies off, his twin immediately pops up, like a head on a Wonder Bread hydra. Its running time of 1:37 isn’t all that hefty, and yet the movie does feel a little long; the chase scenes in particular seem to drag a bit, which is the exact opposite of what a chase scene should do. Some people might also find the plot overly complicated and/or contrived—again, twins? Really?—and the final reveal of whodunit a bit out of left field, but at least it all mostly makes sense in hindsight.

But a movie with delusions of Hitchcock doesn’t have to be Hitchcock to be enjoyable, and I honestly enjoyed UL:FC. Movies about making movies, like books about writing books, all too often fall into the solipsism trap and expect everyone to be fascinated by navel-gazing. UL:FC kindly spares us this fate, and its self-referential digs at lousy actors, flaky crew, and limited resources are, if anything, more entertaining than the murders. With the exception of the very well done first kill (a kidney heist and impromptu decapitation), I barely remember the deaths, but I have a clear memory of one of the effects wonks cursing out George Lucas for using CGI and then looking like he expected to be struck by lightning or something.

I’d say that if you liked Urban Legend at all, give UL:FC a spin. Despite a similar theme transplanted to a different school, it’s actually a very different flick. Gone, for example, is the Dawson’s Creek-style script and a cast pulling hard from the Brat Pack ‘90s Edition; the most recognizable cast member here is Joey “Whoa!” Lawrence, a decade removed from his Blossom fame, as one of the Indistinguishable White Males. And there’s something refreshing about a slasher flick that aspires to Hitchcockian qualities, even if it doesn’t necessarily hit the mark. Honestly, in some ways I feel it’s a better movie than the original, if not necessarily more enjoyable to watch. And the coda scene is worth a grin.

feeling: …sure

Movie: You Can't Kill Stephen King (2012), directed by Ronnie Khalil, Monroe Mann, Jorge Valdés-Iga

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.37 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:09:39 (slow recovery run)

Rule Number 1: always be wary of films with more than one director. Oh, sure, there are exceptions, like some of the Wachowski sisters’ movies, and also anything directed by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont—don’t bother arguing with me because that is a HILL I WILL HAPPILY DIE ON. But generally speaking, a movie having multiple directors is a red flag that might indicate a lack of focus or authorial voice. And that’s why I wish I’d done my due diligence before watching You Can’t Kill Stephen King.

What can I say? I was in a rush to choose, I was in the mood for something a little lighthearted and goofy after the dreadalanche that was Are We Not Cats, and YCKSK seemed like it might hit the spot. I expected a self-aware spoof that parodied the tropes of the genre and specifically brought horror icon Stephen King into the mix to set it apart in a pretty crowded space. (I should clarify: I thought King and his work would feature heavily in the plot. I don’t mean I expected the actual factual Stephen King to appear in this movie; he does not, although that would have been nifty, and might have been a saving grace if done well.)

While I like Stephen King, most people wouldn’t consider me a fan. I’ve read maybe a half-dozen of his novels, a few of his short story collections, and his excellent book on writing. I’ve watched, and mostly enjoyed, a bunch of movies adapted from his stuff. But I’m definitely not one of those people who have memorized every detail of the man’s life and enormous body of work—which is in some sense a bummer, since those are likely the only people to get much out of the slogfest that is YCKSK.

It begins with mild promise, setting itself up as the expected spoof: there’s an underwear-clad co-ed running screaming through the woods until she takes a shovel to the face, Looney-Tunes-style instead of horror-flick-style. After the title card, the characters are introduced with onscreen captions revealing their horror stereotypes, such as “shell-shocked Iraq veteran” and “creepy virgin” and “attention whore.” These six friends are driving to a lake in Maine for some speedboating and cavorting in bikinis, but Ronnie—the aforementioned creepy virgin—is only tagging along because he’s stalking his personal hero Stephen King, who he’s heard lives at the lake they’re visiting.

However, the townspeople are transparently anxious to convince them that Mr. King doesn’t live there after all. And after an interminable wakeboarding montage (what is with all the wakeboarding I’ve been seeing in horror movies lately? Jeez, at least in the Friday the 13th remake it was topless), “token black friend” Lamont gets his throat slit while refueling the minivan at a gas station. The local cops inform the rest of the group that Lamont was killed by a wolf, but they have their doubts—especially when Lamont’s severed head shows up on a stake outside their window and they start getting picked off one by one. Monroe notices that the murders all resemble deaths in Stephen King stories, so they hatch a plan to catch the killer by exploiting that fact.

It’s not much of a plot, but YCKSK has some positive qualities, to be sure. For one thing, for an indie flick that didn’t have studio cash to burn, it looks better than you’d expect, and kudos to the cinematographer, because a couple of the shots were downright gorgeous. The cast, too, turned in performances that weren’t exactly Oscar-caliber, but they were slightly better than I usually see in movies of this pay grade.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I can list in the asset column. YCKSK isn’t remotely scary, and only barely even tries to be funny after the first 15 minutes. (When it does try, it rarely succeeds.) That’s one of the things that’s so off-putting: for a movie that sets itself up as a comedy, it’s all over the map, tonally speaking. Once the first body hits the ground, YCKSK goes full slasher-whodunit and contains less humor than a lot of straight-up horror movies sprinkle in as comic relief… but there sure is a lot of heavy drama about “Iraq veteran” Monroe’s PTSD and the strain it puts on his relationship with Lori, the on-again-off-again love of his life. The movie couldn’t make up its mind whether it should be a comedy, a horror movie, or a romance drama. Gee, it’s almost like it had three different directors or something.

Add to that the fact that Ronnie edges out Jar Jar Binks near the top of my Most Annoying Movie Characters list and that the film spends an hour building up to the shocking revelation which is ALREADY IN THE DANG TITLE, and, well, maybe give this one a miss. The possible exception might be if, unlike me, you happen to be a slavering Stephen King devotee. You may well enjoy spotting the zillion little references to his books, but even the casual King fan will pretty much just say, “oh, the mom and son in the diner are named Wendy and Danny like in The Shining, neat” and leave it at that. Use your judgement.

(Incidentally, a corollary to Rule Number 1: if two of the directors are also the lead actors, hoooo boy.)

feeling: blecch

Movie: Are We Not Cats (2016), directed by Xander Robin

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 6.84 miles, 9’37”/mile, 01:05:53 (slow recovery run)

As much as I enjoyed seeing Night of the Demons again, I’m told that variety is the spice of what-currently-passes-for-life-these-days. If you happen to ascribe to that philosophy, I have some good news for you: if you’re looking for a horror flick that’s the polar opposite to ’80s Halloween-night demon-possession with gratuitous teen nudity, you could do worse than cueing up Are We Not Cats. It has no slashers, ghosts, or jump scares—really, no scares at all. The only demons it has are inner ones and the only zombies are literally everyone going about their day-to-day existences. But it’s an indie film that soaks you through with so much dread and revulsion you’ll want to peel off your skin and boil it in bleach for a few hours after the credits roll. Oh, and it’s a love story.

Eli is not having a good day. By two minutes in, his girlfriend has threatened him with a restraining order; by the four-minute mark he’s lost his job driving a garbage truck; and before six minutes have gone by he’s lost his home, as his parents have sold the house they all live in and need him to move out in the morning. But at least they’re giving him the dad’s old panel truck.

This is when you start to get the idea that everything about this movie is precisely calculated to make you uncomfortable: not even seven minutes have elapsed by the time you’ve watched Eli wrestle a dresser down an outdoor flight of stairs, across the snowy pavement, and up into the moving truck all by himself. Less than a minute later he’s parallel-parked badly and set off someone’s car alarm. By 8:44 he’s hanging out awkwardly on a friend’s couch being told he can use the shower, but not any of the towels. By 9:24 he’s standing naked in the world’s dirtiest tub, turning a wrench to start a trickle of water out of a bare pipe and trying to wash himself. By 9:49 his truck has been vandalized. It just keeps going.

We’ll stop the blow-by-blow of awfulness at 11 minutes, when we see Eli pull hairs out of his beard and eat them. This, it turns out, is important. He accepts a $200 one-shot gig to deliver a rusty engine upstate and is so late that he gets guilted into driving the stranded customer, Kyle, a ride further north. After sort-of bonding over drinking toxic antifreeze (yup), Kyle brings Eli to a basement noise party, where Eli first spots Anya, Kyle’s rail-thin, purple-wigged girlfriend who is clearly unwell. Eli is immediately smitten—more so when they’re crashing out in his truck after the party and he sees her pull out her own hair and eat it. It’s clearly a match made in… well, not heaven, obviously, but this entire movie is about finding out whether we’re looking at hell or just purgatory.

So, between bouts of eating free ketchup soup in roadside diners and peeing blood, Eli works out his Grand Romantic Gesture, which is to go back to the location of the party and steal a light-up organ that Anya seemed so taken with. He then drives it to Al’s Lumberyard, where Anya works cutting down trees, to give it to her—and winds up getting a job from Al in the bargain. After work he delivers the organ to Anya’s loft, where she’s building “one big machine that emits colors and movements to the groove of a record.”

Things get weirdly intimate; they confess their anxieties about their respective health problems, Anya shows Eli her machine in action, they both eat Eli’s hair, and Anya reveals that she is nearly bald beneath her wig because of her compulsion. Will these two crazy kids find love despite the usual barriers of life-threatening health problems and one having eaten all the other’s hair in the night? Or will they let a little thing like nonconsensual DIY abdominal surgery get in their way?

Are We Not Cats is, to put it mildly, unconventional, but weirdly beautiful—or, to be more accurate, beautifully ugly. The movie frames some really nice visual and thematic parallels: the cutting down of trees and the pulling of hairs, Eli’s light-up toy piano and the organ he steals for Anya, Anya stitching up Eli’s torn shirt and Eli stitching up Anya’s incision (both break the thread with their teeth). This sort of thing often comes across as aggressively art-school, but here it’s quite organic. All of the performances are disturbingly believable, and the film clocks in at a lean 77 minutes long, which is exactly the time it needs to tell its story and leave you wondering what hit you.

I should mention that this is one of those movies that I liked way more upon reflection. It’s so viscerally disturbing that right when it was over I thought I wasn’t a fan, but the more distance I got from it the more I realized how good it was. Your mileage may vary A LOT—indeed, I’m sure there are zillions of people who’d argue that Are We Not Cats isn’t a horror movie at all, despite all its body horror and horror of just living life. But if you’re willing to forgo actual scares and wander a few light years off the beaten path, you may well be the sort of person who can appreciate its brand of desolation and unrelenting weirdness. After all, like Anya says: red’s a shout, green’s a scream.

feeling: impressed

Movie: Night of the Demons (1988), directed by Kevin S. Tenney

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.26 miles, 9’04”/mile, 01:05:48 (recovery run)

Hands up, who here was an ’80s teen? Thinking about the first time I read Stephen King got me woolgathering about those long-lost high school years. Well, if you ever feel like watching a horror flick that’s especially representative of 1988, there’s really only one perfect choice. Take it from a guy who WAS a high school senior in that benighted year: nothing screams 1988 quite so loudly or bewilderingly as Night of the Demons. It is the distillation of 1988’s essential salts in horror movie form.

It’s got the big hair. It’s got the Valley Girl makeup. It’s got a Token Black Guy and a Token Asian Girl. It’s got unconvincing stunt doubles and multiple dudes crashing through windows. It’s got Dead Kennedys stickers on a battery-powered boom box and a dumb jock wearing an anarchy sign on his back for some reason. It’s got terrible off-color one-liners and cringeworthy “teen talk” dialogue. It’s got a guy with a cheesy Tony Danza Who’s the Boss? accent, which is especially hilarious whenever he says Angela’s name.

Speaking of Angela, it’s got a goth cheesecake dance routine to a Bauhaus song in an abandoned funeral parlor. It’s got scream queen Leanna Quigley, in what I’m pretty sure is the first role I ever saw her play, if you don’t count her uncredited appearance as one of the mannequins in Tourist Trap. And almost every girl in the movie gets at least some level of nude at some point in Night of the Demons—even the strait-laced goody-two-shoes who does charity work and prays all night. Despite that, it’s got the requisite simple-minded morality in which only the chaste might be spared.

It’s got a simple-minded plot, to match: ten (!) teens break into Hull House, a long-defunct funeral parlor, to have a Halloween party (read: get drunk and screw each other in coffins). Hull House, constructed on a patch of “evil land,” has stood empty ever since its last occupants all mysteriously killed each other one night, so hey, what better place to hold a seance? The teens unknowingly awaken a demonic presence in the basement (like ya do), and one by one they end up possessed and killing and maiming themselves and others in between—or during—slutty-goth choreography and uncomfortable coffin sex. Can any of them survive until dawn? That’s pretty much it, and the whole movie is the standard exercise in seeing who dies and how, but it’s more entertaining than most movies that follow the formula.

It’s got special effects that are actually pretty special. Night of the Demons is the sort of movie that I suspect would have relied heavily on terrible CGI had it been made ten years later, but lucky for us, in the mid-to-late-’80s practical effects were still the only viable game in town, and they’re done quite well here. In addition to competent gore, burns, and possessed-by-a-demon makeup throughout, there are a few standouts: a nicely done dismemberment; a superb shot of eyeballs bursting; and a unique and inexplicable scene with Ms. Quigley I like to refer to as “is that a lipstick in your left breast or are you just happy to see me?”

That last factor alone makes Night of the Demons required viewing in my book. Sure, its characterizations are paper-thin and the film relies heavily on stereotypes to differentiate between its TEN characters, but hey, ya gotta get that body count up, right? Taken as a whole, Night of the Demons is an enjoyable frolic through the psychic traumas of the late ’80s and you should absolutely watch it for a glimpse into the special blend of eleven herbs ’n’ pathologies that plagued our collective consciousness at the time. And also for naked girls. And dismemberments.

feeling: nostalgic

Movie: A Creepshow Animated Special (2020), directed by Greg Nicotero

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 6.74 miles, 8’54”/mile, 59:57 (recovery run)

Oh man, folks, getting old really bites the proverbial wax tadpole. Once you hit a certain age you can put yourself in traction just turning three degrees too far on the couch while reaching for the remote control, so it comes as no particular surprise that those tiny overuse injuries I incurred by running too many nights on the pavement just kept getting worse, and these days I’m hobbling around the house like an NPC that took an arrow in the knee.

Now, I know I pretty much only review horror movies over here and not TV shows, but Arrow-Knee-Me wanted something on the shorter side and easy to swallow, and when I saw A Creepshow Animated Special pop up on Shudder, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it’s technically a “very special episode” of the new Creepshow TV series. I mean, it’s a Special—that’s kind of a movie, right? And it’s animated instead of live action like the rest of the series, and not part of the regular season, so it’s a standalone thingy. C’mon, work with me, here.

Anyway, the real reason I jumped all over ACAS is because the first of the two stories it adapts is “Survivor Type,” my favorite Stephen King short story ever—still one of my models for effective narrative structure in short fiction, and honestly one of the things that got me into horror in the first place. Plus, it’s a man-vs.-himself story about a guy whose body is betraying him and who’s betraying his body in turn, which, for obvious reasons, resonates kinda hard with Arrow-Knee-Me right now. Count me in!

ACAS sticks to the format of the Creepshow TV series, to wit: a 45ish-minute episode comprising two tales of the macabre ostensibly lifted from the pages of a horror comic, with a menacingly jovial Cryptkeeper-style corpse-dude as your host. We see the opening frames of the comic as the camera pans past them, and then a still frame transitions into full motion, and away we go. The only difference here is that the stories are animated cartoons instead of live action. Got it? Nice.

The first story is, as I mentioned, King’s “Survivor Type,” a tale originally told in the form of the recovered journal entries of Dr. Richard Pine, a crooked doctor who was smuggling drugs when his ship sank and who wound up marooned on a tiny island. The journal alternates between a recounting of Richard’s earlier life and the day-to-day horrors of being stranded alone with only the occasional seagull to kill and eat raw. He injures himself trying to signal a plane flying overhead, and winds up needing to amputate his own foot while anesthetized with smuggled heroin. Since he’s starving but can’t kill gulls anymore, he resolves to survive by eating his own foot. And then the other foot. And a few other body parts. How far will he go to survive?

It’s a grim and gruesome tale, to be sure, and tough to watch, even animated. But I felt it lacked the impact of the original short story, most likely because imagining cutting off and eating your own infected limbs is so much worse than seeing it happen to someone else. Also, Richard is voiced by Kiefer Sutherland, and something about his performance kept pulling me out of the story. It’s by no means awful, but I wish it were better.

The other story is “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” by Joe Hill, King’s son—apparently this special is a family endeavor. And the narrative device is the same, albeit modernized: teenage Blake’s “journal entries” are her Twitter feed as she live-tweets from the back seat of a dire family road trip. The family makes a pit stop at—where else?—the Circus of the Dead, where they’re treated to a big-top circus show in which zombies chase humans, devour live lions, and fire themselves out of cannons into the audience in showers of gore. Blake continues to tweet throughout the show, even as her brother volunteers and gets axed in the neck before joining the show as a zombie himself. It’s a preposterous premise; the notion that the show could progress for so long without the few live human attendees (turns out they’re seated amongst corpses) twigging to what’s really happening just beggars believability, but if you’re willing to go the extra mile to suspend your disbelief, it’s a fun yarn.

The stories themselves are fair-to-good in these adaptations, but the animation is… pretty much what you’d expect these days for a project like this. It’s computer-generated and Flash-style, which is cheap and quick to crank out, but far too slick to evoke the feel of the old EC Comics pulp horror funny-books that inspired Creepshow in the first place. I know it’s unrealistic to hope for hand-drawn cel animation like a freakin’ Disney feature from the ’30s, but a boy can dream. In lieu of that, even something as simple as a comic-style halftone filter and faded CMYK color palette might have helped. Or it might have ruined it utterly. Who can say? After all, it’s not like you’d find a story about a Twitter account in a 1950s horror comic anyway.

So, stylistic dissonance be damned: ACAS is a fair-to-middling way to pass three-quarters of an hour. The “Survivor Type” adaptation was a bit disappointing, but I suspect that the source material doesn’t really lend itself to this sort of medium. “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead,” on the other hand, felt right at home in a new-media adaptation, and I do intend to seek out the original short story at some point to compare. Overall, it’s not your father’s Saturday morning cartoon, but pour yourself a bowl of Count Chocula and settle in for a nice for a change of pace.

feeling: amused

Movie: Cherry Tree (2015), directed by David Keating

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.35 miles, 9’06”/mile, 01:06:58 (recovery run)

Okay, so I know I’m guilty of repeatedly referring to an “average horror fan” when clearly no such creature exists. I mean, the term can be a useful shorthand when trying to gauge or describe whether someone will like something or not, but it’s a lazy oversimplification. It makes a lot of borderline-offensive assumptions about the in-fandom alleged universal appeal of, say, double-digit body counts and gallons of gore on gratuitously nude bodies. I really should do better.

On a completely unrelated note, I hereby attest that the average horror fan will probably deplore Cherry Tree. I, however, thought it was not without its charms.

Cherry Tree is set in Orchard, a small village in… Ireland? England? I mean, the movie is Irish and shot in Ireland, but almost all of the characters sound English, so I’m not clear on that. Whatever. We see a girls’ field hockey coach being sacrificed underground by a coven of sack-headed witches, the leader of whom—Sissy—then shows up at the local school as, of course, the new coach, seeing as the old one died suddenly and mysteriously.

Faith is a younger member of the team, bullied by the older girls for, among things, being a virgin—truly a crime at the ripe old age of 15. Sissy’s ears perk up at this; as we all know, witches always need virgins, right? Indeed, as we have been informed via a student presentation on local history in Faith’s Exposition 101 class, there’s an ancient cherry tree in Orchard that once granted magical powers to a coven of witches when they fed its roots with the blood of human sacrifices. But they got greedy and tried to cheat the devil: their plan was to find a virgin (see?), ingratiate themselves with Satan by letting him impregnate her à la Rosemary’s Baby, and then double-cross him and kill the baby to feed its blood to the cherry tree, thus leveling them all up to Superwitch status. The plan went awry, the coven was destroyed, and in these enlightened times no one believes a word of it.

So when Sissy finds out Faith’s father is dying of leukemia, she takes Faith to the chamber beneath the eponymous cherry tree in a refreshing bit of candid hey-look-I’m-a-witch!-ery. Sissy kills and resurrects a chicken using blood-soaked cherries and some truly epic centipedes to demonstrate her power, and offers Faith a deal: bear the coven a child (sound familiar?), and they’ll cure her father’s cancer.

After an understandable freakout, Faith decides to save her father’s life and reluctantly takes the deal. She seduces Brian, her best friend’s crush, at her 16th birthday party, takes him home, and does the deed. Little does she know that the coven has used blood-cherries and flesh-burrowing centipedes to put Satan in Brian’s body. (They have also replaced her usual gourmet coffee with Folger’s crystals.) And in the morning, the coven kills and revives Faith’s dad much like they did the chicken, and Sissy pronounces him cured.

Faith is starting to question her life choices, however, as she gets morning sickness and tests pregnant later that very day—which makes her suspect that just maybe there’s something less-than-innocent about this whole “have a baby for us” deal. Unfortunately, every time she tries to enlist outside help, people wind up dead. And now it’s a race against time, because devil-babies gestate in a little over six weeks—how will Faith keep the blood of Satan’s spawn from feeding the cherry tree and also keep her father alive?

If it all sounds a little preposterous, you’re not wrong, but if you’re not completely averse to indie horror, foreign films, or the notion of a just-turned-sixteen-year-old virgin getting down with Satan-by-proxy, I have to say, Cherry Tree has a lot going for it. For one thing, it’s nice to see the age-old spawn-of-Satan plot given a little twist with the coven’s intended double-cross. For another, the performances are solid, with Naomi Battrick taking on the heaviest lifting as Faith and delivering the goods. The film also just looks good, which is always nice. Say what you will about Cherry Tree, but you have to admit this film has style.

Is it scary? Depends on your personal hangups, I would say. There are a few good jump scares, but beyond that, the film relies heavily on the inherent and interrelated horrors of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and infanticide. Also, there are often ten-inch-long centipedes crawling all over every visible surface (when they’re not burrowing inside people’s bodies, that is). There’s also the oppressive threat of conspiracy, because it seems like pretty much everyone is in on this plot, and the kills are graphic and gruesome without being splattery.

The problem is that the scary bits are less effective than they could be, because Cherry Tree is erratic—in tone, pace, characterization, and just about anything else you can name. Sometimes this lack of equilibrium works to reinforce the feeling of the rational world crumbling beneath Faith’s feet, but just as often it pulled me out of the narrative moment. Also, the throughline of the plot doesn’t match up with the the throughlines of the characters. This gets especially problematic near the end; without spoiling too much, I’ll juts say that the thrust of the story starts to waver when the stakes are suddenly eradicated and you therefore begin to care less just when things get confusing. The final quarter-hour or so moves at breakneck speed, and I admit I started getting pretty lost on a first viewing.

I did enjoy Cherry Tree, though, lovable mess that it is. None of its many flaws strikes me as fatal, though I guarantee the mythical average horror fan will disagree. Oh, and you will probably hate the ending, too. I happened to dig it, which is why you and I aren’t going to be friends.

feeling: sated

Movie: Friday the 13th (2009), directed by Marcus Nispel

Watched on: HBO Max

Ran: 8.18 miles, 8’53”/mile, 01:12:43 (recovery run)

Welcome back, one and all, to Lack of Imagination Theater! From the stagnant mind that brought you “Halloween on Halloween,” thrill to the edge-of-your-seat sequel: “Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th”! Oh, what, you saw that coming? Well, brace yourself for the twist: This Time It’s the Remake™!

While I’d like to say that was by choice, to be honest, the original Friday the 13th wasn’t on any of my streaming services and I didn’t feel like shelling out a rental fee to watch a movie I’ve already seen eleventy-seven times. Luckily, the 2009 remake was just sitting there on HBO Max lookin’ all lonely and forlorn, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I’d seen it maybe ten years ago closer to when it came out, but to be honest, I didn’t remember all that much about it, which meant I could play a bracing round of everyone’s favorite game show, Forgettable Movie or Terrible Memory? Let’s begin, shall we?

2009’s Friday the 13th—hereafter known simply as “The Remake” for the sake of clarity—starts off with a brief flashback to the past: it’s 1980, and the last surviving counselor of Camp Crystal Lake is beheading the mass-murdering Mrs. Voorhees with a machete. So far we’re on familiar ground, though it might strike some as odd to begin a remake with the ending of the original. Whatever; before you even have time to shrug, we’re in the present day and five frisky “young people” are camping near the deserted summer camp. A couple of them are hoping to find a marijuana crop they heard about; a couple of them are screwing in a tent. Meet the machete-fodder.

Just when you think you’ve got your footing, you start noticing that Jason is picking off these campers at an alarming rate: all five characters are either dead or as good as by about twenty minutes in, and you’re thinking “pacing, buddy, PACING!”—and then the title card appears. You realize you’ve just watched a SECOND flashback and what was more or less a really long cold-open. D’oh!

But it’s cool, you barely have time to process THAT because we cut to six weeks later and a whole different assembly of young stoners and fornicators heading up to rich-boy Trent’s summer cabin on the lake: jerkface Trent himself; his unaccountably nice girlfriend Jenna; some guy they keep calling Nolan but is 100% Dick Casablancas from Veronica Mars; Dick-I-mean-Nolan’s girlfriend Chelsea; the Soon-to-Be-the-Other Woman, Bree; and stoner buddies Chewie and Lawrence. That’s… seven? I think? So yeah, there’s plenty of prey to pad out the remaining hour-plus.

Lest you think The Remake is just about watching bodies pile up, there’s a plot! In addition to the seven hedonists wandering blithely into Jason Country, there’s also this guy Clay, who’s motoring around trying to find anyone who’s seen his sister Whitney, who disappeared while camping in the area, oh, about six weeks ago. (Clay: we have bad news, pal.) Trent was a jerk to Clay at the local gas station, as jerkfaces are wont to be, and Jenna didn’t like that. So when Clay comes a-knockin’ at the cabin door on his Sisterquest and Trent persists in his jerkitude, Jenna takes off with Clay to help him find his sister.

Aside from the whole “looking for Whitney” thing, though, The Remake really is just about watching young people make poor life choices and then get killed in inventive, graphic, and entertaining ways. And as always, those ill-fated acts are drinking, drugs, sex, and, um… [checks notes] topless wakeboarding to a kick-ass rock soundtrack. (“Produced by: Michael Bay.” ‘Nuff said.) If you’re watching this movie, the odds are decent that you’re only looking for nudity and gore, and The Remake delivers on both counts. Just don’t expect to remember much of it tomorrow.

Yup, I’m giving myself the benefit of the doubt for once and betting on Forgettable Movie. The search for Whitney and its related plot twist seem like they should be enough to distinguish The Remake from the crowd, if not necessarily from its original, but if I’m honest, nothing about this movie hits quite hard enough to stick. That’s not to say it’s bad—I definitely enjoyed it, but once again, mere hours after seeing it, everything about it began to fade from my memory. I even queued it up yet again to make sure, and beyond those fleeting questions like “is Jason growing pot to lure in victims?” and “since Jenna is in the woods, why isn’t she fighting Jason using her plant-control superpowers?” (Danielle Panabaker was Layla in Sky High, it’s a whole thing, don’t mind me), there just isn’t much there there.

So, if you’re a fan of the Friday the 13th franchise and films of that ilk, by all means, see The Remake—it’s a good time. Just don’t expect to remember much about it later, let alone write any dissertations on it. Thus concludes this installment of Lack of Imagination Theater; who knows? If I’m still doing this nonsense next year, maybe I’ll do the Halloween remake and the original Friday the 13th.

feeling: meh

Movie: Monster Party (2018), directed by Chris von Hoffmann

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.64 miles, 8’52”/mile, 01:07:45 (recovery run)

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a sucker for a heist movie. Or rather, I’m a sucker for an unusual heist movie; considering I’ve never even seen Ocean’s Eleven (either of them), it’d be a stretch to say I was a connoisseur of the genre. But I loved Ocean’s 8, I got a real kick out of Now You See Me, I’m always up for another Inception screening despite its logical flaws, A Fish Called Wanda will always occupy a special place in my heart, and I got super excited when the second half of Happy Death Day 2U pretty much turned into a sci-fi heist. So the premise of Monster Party was more than enough to hook me.

To wit: Casper, Iris, and Dodge (already, those names; you son of a bitch, I’m in) are three young ne’er-do-wells who pretty competently pull off small-potatoes B&Es, thanks in part to Casper’s facility with electronic alarm systems and Iris’s ability to improvise. The only problem is, Casper’s dad has a gambling problem, which has turned into a massive debt problem, which has turned into a finger-cut-off-and-dead-by-Sunday problem—so Casper needs ten large in a hurry and raiding a few more middle-class houses ain’t gonna cut it.

Iris, though, has an in: she’s serving at a catered party this weekend, at a real upscale house she’s worked before. She gets Casper and Dodge in the door as two more servers in hopes that Casper will find a safe he can crack. He does, but there’s just one problem: this joint is wired to the hilt with the utmost in electronic security, and when the plan goes awry due to the… proclivities of the host’s son, the house seals itself up and our team is trapped inside. That would be bad enough in the best circumstances, but this party they’re trying to heist? Turns out it’s a meeting of recovering serial killers. Being locked in with fresh meat has the twelve-steppers all falling off the wagon, and hilarity ensues. Oh, wait, did I say hilarity? I meant disembowelment. Disembowelment ensues.

Once the movie moves from its heist phase into all-out gore territory, things go way over the top—there are samurai swords and neon green chainsaws and a deformed slay-crazy brother hidden away in the basement, all playing out against the backdrop of a failed murder-addict rehab program. While part of me wonders how Monster Party might have turned out had it taken itself more seriously, I can’t fault the decision to go all-out camp; at times the movie feels like the slightly button-down bastard offspring of House of 1,000 Corpses and Crank, which, coming from me, isn’t a criticism. The pace is suitably manic and the soundtrack is killer.

I would say the cast handles themselves fine, although some of the killer guests might be too nuts even for this flick. Virginia Gardner as Iris is the standout, and I didn’t even recognize Robin Tunney as murder-mom Roxanne (I have problems with faces—it’s a brain thing), but she did a great job portraying a woman trying to hold onto her “sobriety” while her family slips back into their old killing ways. Most of the gore is done well and the kills are suitably crazed. Also note that Monster Party doesn’t do the typical horror film thing of opening with some red meat for the gorehounds before settling into the exposition, so if you watch this with someone who doesn’t know much about it, they’ll be pretty dang surprised by the sharp left turn from Heistville into Slasher Heights.

The downsides are few: uneven tone (some scenes feel “obligatory horror”-y or even imported from other movies), a slightly wooden protagonist, and a somewhat disappointing ending. It’s one of those movies you think will go one of two ways, either of which would be a predictable letdown; instead it goes a third by attempting to channel Tarantino, and, regrettably, not all that well. But horror movies aren’t exactly known for their strong narrative conclusions, so you may find the denouement less irksome than I did.

Overall, I doubt that Monster Party will ever be considered a modern horror classic or anything, but it’s some good disposable fun with a nice premise and competent execution. Just don’t expect much more than that and enjoy the ride.

feeling: amused

Movie: The Bye Bye Man (2017), directed by Stacy Title

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.54 miles, 9’14”/mile, 01:09:39 (recovery run)

So I was poking around through the depths of Netflix’s horror section again, looking for something unfamiliar but hopefully not too taxing—sometimes you just don’t want to have to think too much, you know?—when I came across something called The Bye Bye Man. Every instinct I possess screamed inwardly at me to keep looking, just pass that mess right on by, because if anyone has poor enough judgement to make a horror film with a title as brick-stupid as The Bye Bye Man, nothing good can come of subjecting oneself to such punishment.

But get this: turns out I’m an optimist. Judge not a movie by its title and all that, right? Plus, the odds were certainly in my favor that it wouldn’t exactly be a David Lynch think-a-thon, so maybe I’d get lucky and I could coast right through a surprisingly scary and rewarding yet ill-titled hidden gem.

Yeah, it’s… it’s not that. The Bye Bye Man (good lord, I feel my soul die a little every time I type that name) is a decently turned-out and surprisingly good-looking flick that just misses on almost every other level. The script is fatally flawed, the acting is generally sub-par, the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for range from bland to annoying, and there’s just very little reason to care about anything that happens. That said, here’s what happens!

Elliott and his girlfriend Sasha are moving off-campus with Elliott’s best friend John. They’ve rented a suspiciously cheap old house together, because what could ever go wrong in a suspiciously cheap old house? At first it’s just little things like doors slamming shut on their own, the sound of coins rolling across the floor, a nightstand with crazy spiral writing in it and THE BYE BYE MAN carved into the drawer bottom, no big whoop. But after their housewarming party, Sasha’s friend Kim holds a seance, she senses something bad coming, Elliott says “The Bye Bye Man” out loud, and the lights go out.

Thereafter, everything goes wrong: Sasha gets sick, Elliott starts hearing weird scratching noises in the night, John and Kim have a Disappointing Sexual Encounter™, and pretty much all of them start hallucinating things to make them turn against each other. (Gotta love supernaturally-induced love triangles.) Elliott starts researching the Bye Bye Man—you know what, I’m just gonna start calling him “Glenn” for the sake of my digestive system—and finds out the last guy to investigate him was a reporter who wound up killing everyone he told the name to back in the ’60s. Meanwhile, the more he says or thinks the name, the closer Glenn gets—he visits the reporter’s widow in hopes of learning how to break the curse, and you know what, we’re going to leave it there, because somehow they got Oscar-winner Faye Dunaway to play the widow and even SHE can’t get you to care about what’s happening.

Really, if you’re going to watch The Bye Bye Man, watch it as a study in how to take a potentially interesting premise and kill it with a thousand cuts. Like, maybe don’t write your protagonist as a 100%-virtuous Perfect Boyfriend because it smacks of author-insert and it’s hard to take anything else seriously after that. And maybe give the woman who inspires his perfect love more personality than the average coatrack. And if you’re going to have a little girl attending a college housewarming party, maybe have someone—anyone—make some reference as to how that might be a little unusual. Oh, and it helps to have a solid villain, and Glenn himself is… pretty creepy-looking, I guess? But there’s not much to him other than looking creepy.

See, the single biggest problem with The Bye Bye Man is not, surprisingly, its ridiculous title. (No, really!) It’s the choice to leave out even the tiniest smidgen of backstory into who Glenn is. This leads to all sorts of motifs and elements being completely untethered and lacking context. Like, trains figure heavily: there’s footage of a train and bloody clothes on the tracks that is shown more than once, including early on in the establishing flashback scenes. You spend the whole movie thinking you’re eventually going to be told what the deal with the train is. Ditto the coins, and the weird inside-out-looking dog. Nope. You get zilch. I mean, they probably blew half their budget on the unconvincing CGI inside-out-looking dog, and without any backstory, literally no one would have any reason to notice if they’d just left him out altogether and paid for better actors. I mean jeez, at least tell us his name!

Unless it’s Bye Bye Dog, in which case, we don’t want to know.

…It’s totally “Bye Bye Dog,” isn’t it?

Ugh.

(I’m calling him Chuckles.)

feeling: ugh

Movie: Hatchet (2006), directed by Adam Green

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 6.00 miles, 9’21”/mile, 00:56:08 (short recovery run)

Welp, I did it again: I ran too many consecutive nights outside on the pavement (this time, six) and jangled m’bones around a bit more than the ol’ joints could handle. I now have a much more visceral understanding of the term “bone jelly,” but I regret nothing! We had a warm snap, and I couldn’t countenance wasting November nights in the mid-50s what with Pandemic Winter about to chain me to my treadmill for months to come. Trust me—I ran on a treadmill literally every single night of June, and if I see an opportunity to put off spending another month that way, you better believe I’m going to risk it.

On the plus side, while I’m recovering from a few mild overtraining injuries, at least I get to sink my eye-teeth into a handful of scary movies while I do my recuperative penance jogs on the Never-Ending Belt. For my first night back in, I opted for Hatchet, Adam Green’s 2006 love letter to the classic slashers of the early ’80s. I saw it once or twice nearer to when it came out, and I remember having experienced an odd mix of disappointment and delight, though I was fuzzy on the details. I’m pleased to report that I apparently haven’t changed much across the intervening years, because I still find Hatchet to be a flawed but ultimately gleeful caper that’s earned the love it gets from genre fans.

The plot is easy-access but not so simple your brain slides off it: Ben and Marcus are in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but Ben is still smarting from a breakup and not in a partying mood. Marcus reluctantly agrees to leave the festivities and accompany Ben on a haunted swamp tour. When the unqualified tour guide sinks their boat and one of the group is injured by a gator, their night goes from bad to worse. And when local sorta-dead hatchet-to-the-face murderbot Victor Crowley shows up and starts literally tearing members of the stranded tour group to pieces, well, that’s maybe rock-bottom. Does Marybeth, Ben’s new tour-crush and local bad-ass, know enough about Crowley that they can use to survive?

I gotta say, if you’re a particular kind of horror fan, there is LOTS to like about Hatchet: inventive deaths, two metric tons of gore lovingly rendered sans CGI, cameos by horror icons Robert “Freddy” England and Tony “Candyman” Todd, and palpable love for the genre just spraying all over the place as if from a severed artery. Clearly Adam Green made the movie he always wanted to see. Add to that a genuinely funny script in which the humor isn’t the entrée but a really great side dish, and Hatchet is already better than the average slasher flick.

On top of that, I have to give Hatchet some extra credit points for two extremely personal reasons, to wit: 1) Adam Green is a local boy and saw fit to outfit Ben in a Newbury Comics t-shirt, and seeing the Tooth Face logo always makes me smile; and 2) somehow I had forgotten that Mercedes McNab is in this! Yup, Harmony from Buffy plays Misty, a character who, like Harmony, is extremely dumb, but unlike Harmony, is also frequently topless. So if you want to see Alternate Timeline Harmony in which she left Sunnydale before the whole vampire apocalypse thing and wound up doing the equivalent of Girls Gone Wild videos, this is your chance.

That said, Hatchet is far from perfect: sometimes the frat-boy humor wears a little thin, and while I appreciate the characters all being given at least enough backstory to keep them from being just axe-fodder, I kind of feel that it was both not enough about the main characters to make me really care about them and too much about everyone else so the story took a while to get moving. Also, while I understand that it’s an homage to a formula, that doesn’t mean seeing yet another instance of said formula isn’t at least a little wearing. Meanwhile, Hatchet isn’t actually very scary. Partly that’s because we’ve all seen this stuff a zillion times before—the unkillable loner who rips interlopers to shreds—but it’s also because the jump scares just rely on loud sounds and Victor Crowley himself is pretty uninspiring as a franchise Big Bad. He’s little more than a repackaged and transplanted Jason Voorhees minus the hockey mask.

And yet, Hatchet is ultimately more than its shortcomings might imply. I may be reading too much into it, but all the bro humor and gratuitous nudity seems self-parodic, or at least self-aware. It’s not just mindlessly checking items off a list; you can really sense how much fun people had putting this together. So I think of Hatchet less as a scary movie and more as a celebration of scary movies, the kind of flick that will entertain horror fans and make them smile, cheer, and groan, if not necessarily scream.

Sadly, Amazon Prime has only the R-rated version of Hatchet and its sequels available for streaming, which runs counter to the franchise’s whole point of bathing in the craziest excesses of the gore-soaked ’80s, but unless you’ve seen the uncut version, trust me: you’re not going to come away from the R-rated print thinking “well, that seemed restrained.” If you like slashers and somehow missed Hatchet the first time around, give it a go. Despite its missteps, it delivers what Newbury Comics’s slogan promises: “a wicked good time.”

feeling: wicked

Movie: Urban Legend (1998), directed by Jamie Blanks

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 8.05 miles, 9’08”/mile, 01:13:36 (long recovery run)

What to choose for an election night run? I mean, I suppose I couldn’t have opted for anything scarier than the election coverage itself, but I had resolved not to watch because I knew no winner would be declared on the night of, and I didn’t need the extra stress. So I went looking for a movie to watch, and I was in the mood for something familiar. After all, the last thing I wanted on election night was a big scary surprise.

Lucky for me, then, that Shudder had just added Urban Legend to its library! Just seeing the title bathed me in a wave of nostalgia; Urban Legend, together with The Faculty, was one of the first DVDs I ever bought. It was yet another of the late-’90s glut of teen-scream slashers spawned from the success of Scream, but this one distinguished itself with a gimmick practically custom-written for me: all the grisly murders contained within were modeled after various (duh) urban legends. Urban legends and movie horror? Get out of town! If they’d added in some skateboarding, a punk band, and a Buffy cast member or three, it might have been my favoritest movie ever.

Instead, Urban Legend is a pretty but flawed little gem regrettably devoid of punk, skateboarding, or anyone moonlighting from the Scooby Gang, but that’s not to say the cast doesn’t boast a stellar list of ’90s teen-heartthrob talent. We’ve got Tara “American Pie” Reid! Jared “Worst Joker” Leto! Joshua “Dawson’s Pacey” Jackson! Even Rebecca “Noxzema Girl” Gayheart! And that’s not all: horror fans will also appreciate Robert “Freddy” Englund as the enigmatic and ominous Professor Wexler, and the inimitable Brad “Chucky” Dourif in an uncredited appearance as the stuttering gas station attendant.

The star of the show, however, is Alicia “Cybill’s… Daughter, I Guess? I Never Saw That Show” Witt as Natalie, a student at New Hampshire’s Pendleton University. It was a simpler time; a time when college kids had pagers instead of cell phones, you could (should the need arise) track down a killer by looking at who had last signed the little check-out card in the back of a library book, and your manic depressive roommate found her campus hookups by hogging your dorm room’s landline to dial in to the Goth 4 Goth message boards. Unfortunately, there’s a ripple of unease in this idyllic oasis of academia, because people have suddenly started going missing and/or dead.

The kicker is that the action seems strangely centered on Natalie, as again and again she sees her fellow students lured into scenarios mirroring those of famous urban legends before they’re killed by a live-action version of Kenny from South Park. Seriously, the killer is wearing a parka with the hood up, so you get the same plot contrivance as in the previous year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer with the rain slickers: Natalie can’t spot the real killer, because everybody wears the same winter parka. Have I mentioned that it’s not winter? Eh, whatever.

Anyway, Natalie gets the feeling that Axe-Wielding Kenny is somehow related to a shocking secret from her bad-girl past—but maybe it’s just Professor Wexler instead, who teaches a class on urban folklore and has an unrelated shocking secret of his own. Or is her imagination running away with her? Perhaps Damon didn’t die in front of her eyes and is just playing a prank on her for rejecting his advances. Maybe her roommate did commit suicide by slashing her wrists in bed, somehow writing a clear sentence on the wall in her own blood before dying (which wouldn’t explain her strangulation bruises, but sssshhhh, we’re not talking about that). Does it all have anything to do with the anniversary of a dorm massacre that no one will acknowledge ever happened?

If you’re getting the sense that Urban Legend features a convoluted, nonsensical plot, you’re not wrong. I don’t want to go into detail here, but as intriguing as the idea of urban legend-themed murders might be, the way they come off in the movie would make them impossible to plan and execute with any level of confidence. Heck, literally the first murder that starts off the movie could only have happened the way it did by accident—and without the unplannable occurrence, it wouldn’t have matched an urban legend at all.

What I’m saying is that Urban Legend’s plot has enough holes to serve as a decent makeshift colander, and unless you’re making spaghetti and have woefully underprepared, that’s a shortcoming, to be sure. But for me, anyway, the story is engaging enough that I can just sort of surf its dream logic; everything seems to make enough sense until I wake up and start thinking about it. Even so, it feels about 10 minutes too long, and it was made in the late ’90s so you better BELIEVE there’s a sassy Black security guard. But what can I say? When the credits roll, I always feel I had a good time.

I dunno, maybe it’s just because my own higher-education career was so woefully devoid of urban legend-themed murders. I probably should have gone to a liberal arts college.

feeling: nostalgic

Movie: The Rage (2007), directed by Robert Kurtzman

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 8.03 miles, 9’09”/mile, 01:13:36 (long recovery run)

Oh man, where to start with The Rage? I came across it while browsing for something a little more off the beaten path, and said to myself, “Oh, hey! I saw that like ten years ago! That’s the movie about… um…” To my consternation, I found I couldn’t remember anything about The Rage except that it was yet another zombie-virus flick and that it starred Erin Brown. Granted, my memory ain’t what it used to be (and what it used to be wasn’t all that great), but I find the fact that I watched this movie and was unable to recall anything about it to be somewhat alarming. So I gave it a spin.

Well, it turns out that my worries about early-onset dementia are likely unfounded, and that my brain simply repressed any memory of this movie as a self-protective measure. In short, it’s not good.

The Rage begins in a remote cabin in the woods, which a demented Russian scientist named Dr. Vasilienko has turned into a grungy lab of horrors. He’s got a cage of shambling zombies eating a little girl in the background while he’s busy at work cutting open the skulls of a couple of (still-living) unfortunate victims and infecting them with his homegrown Rage virus, which both turns people into crazed cannibals and causes massive rapid deformities—you know, standard mad scientist stuff. Unfortunately, Things Go Wrong™ and a Rage-infected test subject escapes into the woods… but not before infecting Vasilienko himself.

From there, it writes itself: the test subject kills a couple of people having sex in a car and then manages to get himself eaten by vultures, who themselves hulk out and also gain the ability to infect people with Rage by (of course) projectile-vomiting on them. Said vultures then attack an uncle who’s fishing with his niece and nephew; after taking a stream of bird-yench straight in the face, he winds up eating the girl’s vulture-mangled corpse and killing the boy before getting splattered over the road by an RV full of bickering nu-metal fans who spent the night taking drugs and having three-ways. (A tale as old as time; it’s pretty much Beowulf but with slightly more group sex.)

Anyway, the nu-metal fans do their best to fend off attacks by Rage Vultures and the survivors flee through the woods… right into Vasilienko’s Science-’n’-Murder Shack. They’re captured and treated to—and I swear I am not making this up—a pond-ripple wipe to an extended sepia-toned flashback in which Vasilienko narrates his entire backstory. Apparently he cured cancer, but it was all covered up by Big Pharma and now he’s trying to infect the country with Rage and hold the antidote hostage until his brilliance is acknowledged (like ya do). Will the last few survivors escape Dr. Vasilienko and his band of Raged-out zombies to save humanity? More importantly, do you care?

Clearly I didn’t, since I saw all this ten years ago and didn’t remember any of it. While I’m a big fan of Ms. Brown (the erstwhile Misty Mundae), that wasn’t enough to get me invested in a script with, effectively, zero characters in it other than the mad doctor, whose story we aren’t told until the movie is almost over, and which is pretty hackneyed anyway. So yeah, don’t expect The Rage to deliver anything close to a satisfying narrative.

If, however, all you’re looking for is a whole lotta splatter, buddy, you have come to the right place. That opening scene alone is a total gorefest free-for-all, and it pales in comparison to the final reel. I thought the start-at-110%-end-at-150% approach felt familiar, and it turns out that The Rage was directed by Robert Kurtzman, the guy who directed Wishmaster. That film followed a very similar curve, with the side-effects-laden parties from hell at the beginning and end. Notably, Andrew Divoff stars in both movies as well, here as Vasilienko, there as the djinn. I initially thought Vasilienko had a bad Russian accent, but Divoff is actually Russian; apparently terrible melodramatic dialogue will make even real Russian accents sound fake.

The practical special effects are really compelling, which is perhaps no surprise, since Kurtzman is first and foremost an effects wonk. However, every time the movie uses CGI, the results range from simply bad to downright appalling. The worst is the excrement fountain in the final battle, which I would say “looked like crap,” but of course the point is that it didn’t. At all. I will say, however, that at least the CGI vultures seem considerably less-awful if you’ve seen Birdemic. (“Birdemic: The Movie That Makes a Z-Grade Zombie Flick From Three Years Earlier Seem Like a Frickin’ LucasFilm Production!”)

So that’s that: gorehounds may get a kick out of The Rage, but don’t expect anything more, even if you’re an Erin Brown fan (though she does get to kick some zombie butt in the final battle). I’m actually a little curious about the script, because the movie starts out maybe taking itself seriously and is just bad, but I get the distinct feeling that at some point everyone just kind of gave up and let it collapse into a total self-parody with cheesy one-liners and gimmicky zombie boss-fights. Or maybe it’s just really uneven and was always meant to be that way. Who knows? Not me—and if I did, apparently I’d forget soon enough anyway.

feeling: blah

Movie: Thirteen Ghosts (2001), directed by Steve Beck

Watched on: HBO Max

Ran: 7.22 miles, 9’13”/mile, 01:06:39 (recovery run)

Ah, the early 2000s; a magical time when remakes of old horror films swept majestically across the plain! I’m always a little blue on the day after Halloween, so I was looking for something to watch that would be the horror movie equivalent of comfort food—something you know is pretty awful but you love it anyway and it always feels like home. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, at scrolling listlessly through HBO Max’s horror section and stumbling upon Thirteen Ghosts! I’d been looking for that very movie for ages and had my hopes dashed time and again, but here it was, ready and waiting to be devoured like the trashiest microwave burrito that, for reasons you will never fathom, tastes like a hug from mom.

Thirteen Ghosts, for the uninitiated, is Dark Castle’s second horror remake, following hard upon 1999’s House on Haunted Hill. This sophomore effort is a new take on William Castle’s 1960 film 13 Ghosts, which I admit I have not seen, though I am led to believe that it bears little resemblance beyond having a big house, a dude named Cyrus, and, um, 13 ghosts (but don’t hold me to that). What I can tell you with the authority of experience is that Thirteen Ghosts is not a very good film, and I love it—not because it’s not very good, and not despite that fact, either; its quality somehow seems to have no bearing whatsoever on my affection for its problematic little soul.

The movie starts with a bang: Cyrus Kriticos is a filthy-rich and megalomaniacal ghost hunter out to expand his collection, with the reluctant mercenary help of psychic Dennis Rafkin. They’ve brought some sort of paranormal SWAT team to a junkyard and are spraying a TRUCKFUL OF BLOOD all over everything as bait for the ghost of a serial killer. Needless to say, everything goes hilariously wrong, assuming you find body parts flying every which way to be hilarious, which, of course you do. The ghost is eventually captured, but not before Cyrus takes it in the neck.

Cut over to Arthur Kriticos, a schoolteacher whose life is not going super-great; his house recently burned down, and he lost his wife and everything they owned. Now he’s struggling to raise their two kids Kathy and Bobby in a tiny apartment on his own, with the arguable help of a sassy nanny named Maggie who can’t cook—and if you think that sounds like the premise of a heartwarming ‘90s family sitcom, you’re not wrong. But look, here comes a slimy lawyer with Uncle Cyrus’s video will; Cyrus has left Arthur his Crazy Millionaire Glass House in the Middle of Nowhere! This family’s troubles are over!

Or they would be, if it weren’t for the fact that the Crazy Glass House is actually a diabolical machine that is using the 12 archetypal ghosts trapped in the basement to open the Eye of Hell. Ain’t it always the way? So now the family is trapped inside with Dennis (who lied his way in to try and find the money Cyrus owed him), a bleeding-heart ghost liberator named Kalina, and a dozen mostly-murderous ghosts who are being systematically set free from their basement cells as the Crazy Glass House does its whole hell-eye-opening thing. Cue lots of running from killer ghosts that humans can only see through special glasses, a surprise guest or three, a running theme of self-sacrifice, a good ol’ double-cross, and a heaping helping of Hollywood-brand Love Conquers All.

Sounds dumb, you say? You’re not wrong, but there’s a reason the term “dumb fun” is a thing, and Thirteen Ghosts sprays a truckful of THAT all over everything, too. There’s plenty of violence and splatter (bodies getting torn to shreds, transected coronally, crushed flat on-camera, etc.), but most of it is weirdly sanitary, due to what I’m pretty sure is a near-exclusive use of CGI effects, many of which have not aged well, which only adds to the experience. And with a copyright year of 2001, this film is still channeling Big ’90s Energy, so the inclusion of a sassy Black nanny as comic relief among the dramatis personae was deemed “acceptable representation,” especially because there’s a perfectly fine but tonally jarring rap track (by Rah Digga, who plays Maggie) played over the closing credits.

Moreover, since Thirteen Ghosts is a Hollywood flick, you’ve got some recognizable cast members traipsing their way through a nonsensical script, including Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham—I know, right?—as Cyrus, Tony Shalhoub as Arthur, Matthew Lillard as Dennis, and Shannon Elizabeth as Kathy; most people know her as Nadia from American Pie, but to me she will always be Jill from Jack Frost, one of the first true horror-schlockfests I ever saw, and so she occupies a special place in my heart.

Look, it ain’t high art, but if you’re looking for something to grin at while you eat too much popcorn, for my money you could do a lot worse. Thirteen Ghosts is neither good nor so bad it merits watching for that reason, either, but its cast, its eye candy, and its clueless charm somehow brew up a fair bit of entertainment in a near-vacuum of actual quality, and that’s no mean feat. I can’t in good conscience rate it any higher than two-and-a-half bloody severed feet, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen it a zillion times. And I’ll probably see it a zillion more.

feeling: nostalgic

Movie: Halloween (1978), directed by John Carpenter

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.58 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:08:22 (recovery run)

I know, I know—how cliché to watch Halloween on Halloween. But here’s the thing: I was short on time because I needed to get my Pandemic Trick-or-Treat Station of (non-)Doom set up outside, and since that included dealing with freezing temperatures and the four inches of snow we’d gotten the day before, I really wanted to get my run out of the way early and couldn’t spend my usual indecisive hour cruising the streaming services looking for just the right movie. Besides, it had been a while since I’d seen the original, and it deserves to be revisited. So, Halloween on Halloween it is.

Since there’s almost no chance that anyone reading this hasn’t seen it yet (heck, there’s almost no chance that anyone’s reading this at all!), we’ll speed-run the summary: a six-year-old kid named Michael Myers stabs his post-coital teenage sister to death for no apparent reason, spends 15 years catatonic in a psychiatric facility, and then breaks out to steal a William Shatner mask and kill a bunch of babysitters in his hometown of Haddonfield, IL. His pistol-packin’ psychiatrist Dr. Loomis tries to warn the local police, oblivious to the fact that Cassandra-like portentous ramblings about Myers being the Ultimate Evil Ever Unleashed might be a bit of a buzzkill and therefore of limited success. Meanwhile, when all her babysitter friends wind up getting the pointy end of a butcher knife in their various soft bits, it’s up to booksmart-and-dateless Laurie Strode to protect the little kids from the unstoppable bogeyman.

I’m not sure there’s anything good left to say about Halloween that hasn’t been said before. It’s got everything you’d want in a horror movie, with the possible and notable exception of excessive gore (which it absolutely doesn’t need). The script is solid—okay, I admit that the characterization is a little thin and some of the dialogue is iffy, but on balance, the characters are believable and their motivations are sound. And that’s why where the script really shines is the plot. So often in horror, people do things for no reason other than the story demands it, or make choices that seem totally counter to their personalities or interests. In Halloween, the story moves forward because everybody does things that make sense for them in the moment—Annie makes popcorn, she spills butter on her clothes, she goes to the laundry room to wash them, she gets locked inside, etc. etc.—and it’s weird how rare that seems to be in the genre.

Anyway, in no particular order and off the top of my pointy little head, here’s a further list of stuff I adore about Halloween: Jamie Lee Curtis AND P.J. Soles (I mean COME ON); one of the most effective musical scores ever; Michael’s head tilt while he appreciates a corpse; the establishment of the trope that the nerd girl survives; Donald Pleasence as a psychiatrist who’s somehow diagnosed Michael as being pure evil even though the patient has never said a word in 15 years; jump scares that actually work; that shot when Michael suddenly sits up in the background after having been “stabbed to death”; the way Michael is just walking around Haddonfield out in the open because no one knows enough to be scared of him yet; the way that the little kids are always right about the bogeyman.

My big gripe is that Halloween was so good, the makers had to shelve their original vision of the franchise, which was to be different unrelated Halloween-themed horror stories in each installment. The first story was too successful, though, and so Halloween II was instead a direct sequel with the same characters. That’s why Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a totally standalone installment with no Haddonfield, Michael Myers, etc.—they’d gone back to their original plan, only to find that, true to form, Michael Myers refused to die; fans revolted, and every Halloween film since then has been Michael, Michael, Michael. (As for me personally, while I acknowledge it’s not the best in the series, Halloween III is the one I most enjoy watching. I hereby await the mob of angry villagers with torches and Frankenstein rakes.)

If it’s been some time since you made that first stop in Haddonfield, do yourself a favor and take another look, because I don’t know how much was sheer genius and how much was pure dumb luck, but the makers really captured lightning in a bottle on this one. It’s not the first slasher out there, but it’s one of the best, and in it you’ll see the seeds of plenty that have come along since.

Oh, and Happy Halloween!

feeling: bogeyman

Movie: Double Date (2017), directed by Benjamin Barfoot

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.63 miles, 9’20”/mile, 01:11:12 (slow recovery run)

What’s this? It seems that I have inadvertently chosen to watch two horror-comedies in a row. Could it be that my psyche is trying to tell me something? Is it begging for, if not the sweet, sweet release that only death can bring, than at least the most minimal relief from all of [gesticulates at everything everywhere] THIS in the form of a wan chuckle or two? It is truly a mystery for the ages. In any event, tonight’s flick is Double Date, a delightful English romp that will invite inevitable comparisons to Shaun of the Dead because it’s got some laughs and everyone talks funny.

Double Date begins with, appropriately enough, a double date: two sisters, Kitty and Lulu, have brought a pair of drunk numbskulls back to their mansion. The lads assume they’re there for a bit of fun, but actually they are there for a bit of excessively stabby murder (so, a bit of fun). And when I say “excessively shabby,” Kitty knifes her fella a total of 19 times—I counted, because I’m like that.

Anyway, after the most stylish animated opening credits sequence I’ve seen in quite some time (seriously, it’s a thing of beauty and the creators should be commended), we cut to Our Hero, Jim, who is getting dumped via text message in a pub. Jim’s about to turn 30 and he’s still a virgin, which he feels is cause for consternation. His friend Alex promises to get him deflowered before the Big 3-0, which leads to misadventures, e.g. a night in jail for Jim when Alex fixes him up with a drunken grieving widow; Jim rejects her advances and innocently takes her to her home to sleep it off, and the local constabulary assumes nefarious intent.

The next day, Jim is being understandably disconsolate in the pub when who should walk in all sexy and slo-mo but Kitty and Lulu? Much to his surprise and alarm (and to Alex’s utter incomprehension), they are overtly interested in Jim. Despite making one of the worst chat-up attempts in the history of spoken language, Jim is astonished when the sisters agree to meet him and Alex later for some reason. The reason, it turns out, is that Kitty and Lulu are actively targeting Jim for demographic purposes: in addition to the corpses they’ve already collected, these two daddy’s girls need a virgin to sacrifice in order to complete a spell to bring their father back from the dead.

So that’s our premise, and the rest of the movie consists of the real double date of the title. The sisters’ ultimate goal is to get Jim back to the mansion for the sacrifice before the end of the night, but there are multiple amusing detours and ensuing hijinks, such as a truly abysmal music concert they attend in order to buy drugs, and a birthday party for Jim with his impossibly embarrassing and strait-laced Christian family, complete with a family dance routine that will make you cringe so hard you’ll need corrective surgery afterwards. Follow that up with a drug-related car crash (just say no, kids), a visit to Alex’s aggressively awful dad to borrow his car, and finally it’s back to Murder Mansion for the whole ritual-killing-and-zombie-dad thing. The only hitch is that Lulu has grown rather fond of Jim over the course of the evening; will she still be able to go through with it all?

There’s quite a bit to like about Double Date; it’s smart, even when some its characters aren’t, and while it’s rarely sidesplittingly funny, it maintains a pretty consistent drip-feed of dependable British humor. All of the actors are competent and their performances believable, with the sisters being the standouts: Kelly Wenham as Kitty is appropriately unhinged and clearly actually capable of kicking a boxing dummy’s head off in slow-motion. And the conflicted Lulu is played with disarming sweetness by Georgia Groome, who was delightful as Georgia Nicolson in the otherwise-disappointing film adaptation of Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging (what can I tell you, I have a soft spot for British YA fiction).

On the list of potential negatives, Double Date does feel formulaic at times, and occasionally predictable (Chekhov’s Pen Knife makes an obvious appearance, for example). It also has what must be the single longest bare-knuckle fight I’ve ever seen on film, which may or may not count against it. Seriously, it makes me want to fire up They Live and time that ridiculous and interminable fistfight between Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper with a stopwatch, because I think Double Date may have it beat—in duration, yes, but also in violence, realism, and excitement. Horror fans should also be forewarned that the film doesn’t get overtly supernatural until the final ten minutes, so until then, you’re mostly watching a serial killer flick in which there are occasional shots of someone painting arcane symbols on the floor with blood.

Still, good times all around. Double Date isn’t likely to become a time-honored classic like Shaun of the Dead, but I don’t hesitate to recommend it to people looking for a fun evening in, especially those who enjoy British humor. It beats the risk of getting bled out for the sake of raising someone’s father from the grave, anyway.

feeling: amused

Movie: Scare Me (2020), directed by Josh Ruben

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.29 miles, 8’51”/mile, 01:04:31 (recovery run)

I was kindasorta in the mood for an anthology for tonight’s run, and I remember Scare Me showing up on Shudder recently, which sounded like it would probably fit the bill. In the end, though, what I thought I was getting and what I actually got were two very different things—and not at all in a bad way, because it’s only kindasorta an anthology. The elevator pitch is that Scare Me is about two horror writers, Fred and Fanny, in a remote mountain cabin who pass the night during a power outage telling each other scary stories by the fire. (If you’re a lit nerd like me, you’re all “sounds like a modern take on the Shelleys and Byron and Polidori telling ghost stories at the Villa Diodati” and I’m like “YES, WHO ARE YOU, WE NEED TO GET COFFEE SOMETIME.”) If this were a typical horror anthology, that premise would be the frame story and the tales the writers tell would be separate short films edited together between the introductions. It’s a tried and true format, but one that’s getting awfully creaky in the hip joints by now.

Well, good news! As I said, Scare Me is not a typical horror anthology—not by a long shot. If anything, it feels more like a stage play: there’s basically a single setting, two main characters, a couple of supporting characters who only appear for short periods, and a LOT of dialogue. The scary stories they tell each other are literally told to each other; we don’t have Fred saying “once upon a time there was a blah-dee-blah” followed by harp music and a cheesy fade into seeing the blah-dee-blah then do whatever it is blah-dee-blahs get up to in campfire stories. True, Fred and Fanny actually get up and act out their stories in the cabin, and there are awesome little sounds and visual effects (Fred’s hand being shown briefly as a werewolf paw, e.g.) added to convey the experience of what happens in your imagination when you hear a scary story, but beyond that, Scare Me is literally “tell, don’t show.” That will drive some people crazy, and honestly, I’m all in on this.

Why? Because Scare Me, on one level, is a movie about writing, and a good one at that. So many things can go wrong when writers write things about writing—there are plenty of pitfalls to the “write what you know” edict, pretentious solipsism ranking among the rookiest of mistakes—but this movie is smart about it. Fred is a “writer” who doesn’t write; he starts with lazy ideas and then takes the shortest and most obvious path from point A to point B. Or would, if he ever even left point A, but mostly he just dreams of being AT point B and he never takes even the first real step to get there. Fanny, on the other hand, is a massively successful author who is enjoying precisely the sort of life and accolades that Fred only dreams about because she actually writes. All this comes out as they tell each other stories: Fred tosses out hackneyed ideas, and Fanny pushes him to go further. It starts out as a jam session, but what we’re really watching is a writer’s workshop by firelight.

That alone would probably have endeared me to Scare Me, but it’s also a night out at an improv club. There’s a palpable sense of joy that just comes off this film in waves when the writers (and, eventually, the pizza guy) are acting out their off-the-cuff stories. You really get the feeling that the actors are enjoying the hell out of themselves, and it’s infectious. Granted, that’s not necessarily the sort of thing you always want from a horror movie, but if you’re in the mood for a laugh and you like your comedy a little horror-flavored, Scare Me has you covered.

Which is not to say that this movie is just a horror-comedy, because it eventually does get around to becoming just plain scary, and this is where a lot of people will, unfortunately, just nope on out: Scare Me ultimately makes the case that werewolves and vampire-zombies and murderous trolls who live in the walls of Edible Arrangements stores are not nearly as scary as male fragility and gender-based entitlement. Jealous of her success and unable to scare her with his stories, Fred eventually settles for intimidating her with the threat of good ol’ man-on-woman violence. I don’t want to get more specific than that, but I do want to point out that this does not come out of left field, as a lot of people seem to think; literally everything about the entire movie has led inescapably to this sort of ending, and the REALLY scary thing is the number of people who can’t see that.

A movie that is essentially a stage play on film can’t slide by with mediocre acting, and Scare Me delivers the goods. Both Aya Cash (currently kicking hinder as Stormfront on The Boys) and writer/director Josh Ruben are stellar as Fanny and Fred, respectively, Rebecca Drysdale nails her small bookend role as Bettina, and Chris Redd is so damn cuddly as Carlo the Pizza Guy that if they announced a plush version of him as movie merch I’d be all SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. The writing is smart, especially in moment-to-moment beats and dialogue, though the overall pacing is a little uneven; the movie is slow to get going, and the acceleration to the climax feels a bit rushed. And while the HARD left turn it takes at the end is justified logically by everything we’ve seen up to that point, the tonal shift is so drastic that it derails much of what has made the previous 90 minutes so enjoyable. I understand that’s likely the point, but I’m not certain that it was the right choice, nor that the implementation was quite where it needed to be.

Bottom line, though, I loved Scare Me. If you’re allergic to what you perceive to be “social justice virtue signaling” in your horror, give it a miss and just queue up yet another generic splatterfest and count the naked breasts, but you’re missing out on a really smart and funny film that has important things to say and a fresh way in which to say them. I mean, Fred has literally watched Fanny do the work of being a writer all night long and he still sees her as a “little girl” who has had everything handed to her on a platter, yet when she tells him that her best-selling novel is “really about gender politics,” he replies, “Huh. I don’t see it.” Don’t be like Fred, dude. There’s a reason that what finally scares Fanny is yet another fragile white guy’s ego: it's because she knows she’ll never escape them.

feeling: impressed

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welcome to my nightmare

I run literally every day, but I'm not supposed to be outside while the sun's up (for, um, reasons), and also there's a pandemic on and running in a mask sucks. On rare occasions I chance a late-night run on unlit and deserted paths, but maybe 85% of the time these days, I run on a treadmill in my living room.

Running on a treadmill for an hour is boring, though, especially day after day. My solution? Watching horror flicks. I queue up a scary movie and let the miles fly by. The speed boost of an adrenaline rush is just an added bonus. Allow me to share with you the myriad wonders of... RUNNING SCARED.

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