runningscared | Entries tagged with 3.0 bloody severed feet

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Vacancy (2007), directed by Nimród Antal

Watched on: STARZ

Ran: 7.61 miles, 9’17”/mile, 01:10:37 (careful recovery run)

Hey, so I have access to STARZ again! I mean, I never stopped having access to STARZ on cable (yes, I have cable; I’m old, we’ve established that), but at some point recently when I tried to sign into the STARZ app on my Apple TV, it said “sorry, your cable provider no longer includes access to this app; please contact them to complain.” I, however, being temperamentally—if not ethnically—British, instead harrumphed disapprovingly to myself and stewed silently in the injustice of it all.

I did, however, try signing in once a week or so, just to see if the situation improved, and suddenly it did! And that’s how I came to watch Vacancy, a movie I hadn’t seen since it first hit premium cable a dozen or so years ago. What can I say? After the fiercely indie weirdness of Lace Crater, I was in the mood for something aggressively Hollywood as a palate cleanser, and on that front, Vacancy does not disappoint.

Vacancy, for the uninitiated, is about Amy and David, a couple in the throes of the divorce process. They’re road-tripping back from Amy’s parents’ anniversary celebration when David swerves hard to avoid a raccoon in the road and subsequently winds up lost in the middle of nowhere at 1 AM and now the engine is making some very troubling sounds. They make it to a repair shop which seems to exist thirty miles from anything except for a totally unsuspicious and 100%-un-Bates-like motel that happens to be situated right next to it. The friendly mechanic is leaving for the night, but checks under the hood and assures the unhappy couple that they’ll easily make it to the next town… where, y’know, a real mechanic will be able to help them.

To the surprise of literally no one watching, the car dies completely about a mile or two down the road, and David and Amy have no choice but to hoof it back to the motel and rent a room for the night, since the mechanic won’t be back until morning. So they get their room key from the not-at-all-Norman-Bates-like proprietor (who was apparently watching torture porn in the back room when they entered—always a good sign), head to Room 4, and try to settle in for a relaxing wee-hours session of passive-aggressive bickering.

But even though they’re the only guests in the motel, someone’s banging on their door and walls. Not-Norman-Bates isn’t being much help about that, so it’s not long before David tries to unwind by watching some of the unlabeled videotapes on top of the room’s VCR, only to discover that all of them are multi-camera security footage of guests being tortured and killed in a motel room. THIS room. The one in which Amy and David are currently experiencing a slow, sinking feeling after finding cameras hidden in the walls and vents.

So yeah, the rest of the movie involves David and Amy fighting for their lives while Not-Norman and a couple of masked attackers try to make them the stars of their next snuff film. From there on out it’s a pretty by-the-numbers action thriller comprising clever gambits, plenty of near-misses, and multiple deaths in what are intended to be nail-biting circumstances, but don’t worry, because—and I cannot stress this enough—the raccoon is totally fine.

You may well have guessed that this film owes rather a large debt of inspiration to Hitchcock in general and Psycho in particular, which is clear right away from the style of the animated opening credits and the Bernard Herrmannesque score. Don’t get me wrong—Vacancy is no Psycho. It’s a reasonably effective piece of work overall, with a good premise and a decent build-up of tension in the first acts (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale are almost too believable as a couple on the outs—apparently they had real problems with each other on set, and it works for them), but once it turns into an overt fight for survival, Vacancy lacks the tautness and pacing of a Hitchcock movie, and most of that tension is lost.

Still, “It’s Not as Good as Hitchcock” is hardly a scathing criticism, and Vacancy is an enjoyable thrill ride that I don’t regret taking a second time. It’s true that the line between horror and thriller is often super-fuzzy, and some might argue that Vacancy shouldn’t be counted as a horror film at all; there’s not much gore, the body count is low, and the ending is very Hollywood. But in my book, it gets the nod for precisely one horrifying moment: the moment when David and Amy are watching what they think are low-budget horror movies and it slowly dawns on them that they’re watching real guests being real-murdered in their real motel room. It’s only a moment… but what a moment. Check it out, and give credit where credit’s due.

feeling: uneven

Movie: Lace Crater (2016), directed by Harrison Atkins

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.08 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:06:58 (careful recovery run)

So I’m slightly injured, I think—I’ve got some pain in the ball of my left foot, and inflammation of the hip flexors, which I put down to four consecutive nightly runs outside on the pavement for 7-8 miles each. I think I just pushed things a little too hard and now my body is yelling at me for it. So for now, I guess I’m back on the treadmill for slow and gentle runs until things start healing up a bit, which is a drag, but since the ol’ mortal coil has apparently betrayed me, this seems to be the perfect excuse to trot out some slow-moving body horror like Lace Crater, which I found while poking around through the back alleys of Amazon Prime’s horror section. You know, where the weird stuff hangs out.

And Lace Crater certainly qualifies as at least a little weird in my book. Maybe not for the first act, which I found a bit hard to get through; I’m not generally a fan of the mumblecore thing, and the first 20-30 minutes of Lace Crater is yet another exercise in watching a vague clot of twenty-somethings who are ostensibly (if not necessarily demonstrably) friends as they go off to spend a weekend together somewhere. There they have the obligatory inarticulate and banal conversations which somehow get even less interesting when they get stoned. However, things get considerably less dull when Ruth—who is fresh out of a breakup and looking to hook up with Andrew who is ALSO fresh out of a breakup and seems like he’d be into it until he abruptly leaves their molly-soaked cuddle pile and makes her doubt her attractiveness and self-worth because these twenty-somethings are so very, very high school—goes back to her room and bangs a ghost.

I mean, there’s more to it than that, such as some of the best foreplay sweet nothings ever committed to digital storage. (“Do you defecate?” Ruth asks Michael the Burlap-Covered Ghost; bestill my fluttering heart.) But honestly, the conversation between Ruth and Michael is the only interesting one in the movie, so I’m gratified that the participants were rewarded with a little spontaneous across-the-Great-Divide bow-chicka-bow-bow. The problem is, the next day Michael is gone and Ruth doesn’t feel so hot. She throws up on the car ride home, which might be a hangover, and keeps waking up covered in a thick coating of slime, which… probably isn’t. She’s also hallucinating and experiencing weird space-outs and time skips, and her doctor thinks she may have picked up a very rare sexually transmitted infection which he ominously declines to name. (Give it to her straight, doc—is it Spectral Herpes, or a dose of the Ectoplasmic Clap?)

It’d have to be a pretty dang rare STI indeed, because I’m thinking back to health class and I don’t recall one that causes your skin to peel off like you had the world’s worst sunburn and also makes you projectile-vomit mysterious black liquid, but, granted, it was a long time ago. Anyway, Ruth’s physical form and mental health deteriorate rapidly, as her friends shun her either for allegedly sleeping with Andrew when omiGAWD-I-wanted-to-sleep-with-Andrew, or just for being Spectral-Herpes-gross, or both. Even her ex has a new girlfriend, so she’s driven back to the coach house that Michael haunts; can she find happiness, or at least closure, with her wraith-with-benefits?

With a narrative like that, it could have been a straight-up gross-out horror movie, but Lace Crater aspires to more than that. Having seen that it’s devoid of both lace and craters, I can confirm that its unusual and opaque title is definitely evocative and not literal, which might indicate to you that the whole film has a heavy film-school-final-project vibe to it. This is Harrison Atkins’s first and only feature, and he leans in on the surrealism pretty hard, which can get tired really fast when it’s done poorly. The good news is, I think it’s done quite well here, and everything is lent a welcome cohesion by virtue of a terrific performance by Lindsay Burdge as Ruth, as well as a suitably haunting (I know, I know) soundtrack.

If you aren’t big on the arthouse aesthetic and you like plot-driven movies with unambiguous endings, you should steer clear of this one. I have my own personally satisfying interpretation of everything that happens and what it means, so Lace Crater doesn’t leave one completely at sea, but as Burlap Michael tells us straight out, “you don’t get the answers. The answers never come.” Unless, of course, you bring your own.

Oh, and if you get frisky with a ghost, make sure to use protection.

feeling: staring into the abyss

Movie: Spider Baby (1967), directed by Jack Hill

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.54 miles, 9’13”/mile, 01:09:33 (recovery run)

All right, I confess: I’ve been staring at a blank screen for ages because I had practically no idea how to start writing about the cinematic paradox known—among other titles—as Cannibal Orgy, Attack of the Liver Eaters, and, eventually, Spider Baby. Eventually, though, I decided that was okay, since it’s pretty clear that the film’s creators didn’t have much idea about the best way to start it, either (or, evidently enough, what to name it). So let’s start at the very, very beginning and see where that gets us, even if it’s only to the asylum.

See, I knew Spider Baby by reputation to be a horror classic with some pretty dark themes, so I was not at all prepared for its completely bonkers opening credits sequence, complete with smiling cartoon versions of the characters that look like refugees from a black-and-white Rocky and Bullwinkle Halloween special. Its typeface is pure ’60s and straight out of some Doris Day feature, and yet even Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was in color. And what about the theme song, which is about as terrifying as the "Monster Mash"? Is anybody supposed to be scared when Lon Chaney Jr. oh-so-spookily informs us that “Frankenstein, Dracula, and even the mummy are sure to end up in somebody’s tummy”?

So, two minutes in we’re already totally at sea, and now there’s a clean-cut Dick Van Dyke type (who is, in fact, not wearing an ascot, though later you’d swear in court he was) telling us about the Merrye Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that sends descendants of Ebeneezer Merrye spiraling into mental regression to a “pre-human condition of savagery and cannibalism,” and now we’re going to be privy to the story of “that fateful day” when the Merrye Syndrome was eliminated once and for all. Fair enough. Let’s flash back to a hapless delivery man nervously entering the Merrye Estate grounds through a big, scary iron gate while what passed for foreboding music makes us wonder if maybe we accidentally sat down to an episode of The Munsters. No one answers his knocking, so he pokes his head in through an open window…

…At which point he is immediately slashed to death by a pretty young girl swinging two big ol’ butcher knives. AND WE’RE OFF!

The girl is Virginia Merrye, the Spider Baby of the title (well, one of the titles), who has regressed enough that she enjoys “playing spider” by catching people in her web and stinging them to death. Her disapproving sister, Elizabeth, is similarly childish due to the ravages of the Merrye Syndrome. Their older (and, hence, regressed-beyond-speech) brother is Ralph. And rounding out this fun little family is their caretaker, Bruno, who was once their father’s loyal chauffeur, but who now hides the dark secret of the Merrye clan away from the world—a task which includes feeding the cannibal aunts and uncles shackled up in the basement.

Unfortunately for the Merryes, their idyllic and murderous seclusion is about to end, because the delivery man was bringing a letter announcing the imminent arrival of a couple of distant cousins, “Aunt” Emily and “Uncle” Peter. Emily wants to slap the kids in an asylum and claim the sizable Merrye estate herself, so when she and Peter turn up with a lawyer and his assistant in tow, Bruno needs to find some way to keep the family skeletons—both figurative and literal—in the closet. But it won’t be easy, because the interlopers insist on staying the night in the mansion, and those Merrye kids are awfully rambunctious…

I’m still not sure whether I liked Spider Baby despite its tonal schizophrenia or because of it. I was reminded a little bit of Arsenic and Old Lace, which plays unrepentant serial killers for laughs in a romantic comedy, but that was very clearly intentional, whereas Spider Baby could just as easily be the result of a weird combination of blind luck and blinding ineptitude. It definitely pushes the boundaries a bit considering it was filmed in 1964, though; in addition to violent murders committed by mentally deficient minors, there are also explicit mentions of cannibalism, and thinly-veiled references to incest and rape. Wrap all that up in an early ’60s sitcom aesthetic and what we’re left with is a horror film that is unquestionably far ahead of its time, but also somehow feels way, way behind it.

Whether that’s a problem or not is left as an exercise for the viewer. Besides, Spider Baby did give us Sid Haig, and that was a gift that kept on giving. And I would be lying if I said that the acting overall wasn’t pretty solid—I’ve seen plenty of movies in which the best (well, “least awful”) performance was worse than the worst one in Spider Baby. Among the speaking roles, Jill Banner is the standout as Virginia; apparently she was only 17 when the movie was shot, but she really nailed it.

So is there a vein of genius running through all this? I honestly couldn’t say. Sometimes I feel that people are just reading into it what they want to see, but every so often I have to wonder if this deformed celluloid monster was intentionally architected and just beyond the reach of my puny mortal comprehension. There’s no doubt that Spider Baby is beloved by a vocal sub-sect of horror fans, and I do suspect it was influential (the dynamics of the family dinner with the outsiders reminded me a lot of the dinner scene to come in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example). For all its flaws, the one thing I can say with certainty is that I don’t regret having watched it. Heck, I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, if only for the cerebral whiplash.

feeling: nonplussed

Movie: He’s Out There (2018), directed by Quinn Lasher

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.26 miles, 8’54”/mile, 01:04:34 (recovery run)

Oh boy, what do I do with He’s Out There? I doubt I ever would have thought to watch it at all, except it happened to be on Pluto TV’s horror channel while I was doing other things and I got sucked in after missing the first twenty minutes. So I checked, and Amazon Prime had it available, which meant not only could I see it from the beginning during my nightly run, but I could also watch it without being interrupted by commercials urging me to “climb aboard the Trump train” every seven minutes. (The movie’s plenty scary enough already, thank you very much.) But I have a polar ambivalence about how to rate it, because while He’s Out There does a whole bunch of stuff badly, it does a few key things very, very well.

On its face, He’s Out There appears to be yet another generic slasher film with yet another masked maniac preying on yet another helpless group of victims stranded in the woods. This time the prey are Laura and her two young daughters Kayla and Maddie, who have gone up to their lake house for one last late-season weekend away; Laura’s husband Shawn will be driving up alone after his business meeting, and expects to arrive later that night. The gate is unlocked for Laura by a local named Owen (we are never told his full name, but I suspect it’s “Owen Exposition”), who casually mentions that the house’s previous owners had a kid who vanished in the woods, and they took it real hard so they sold the place and moved away.

It’s not long before creepy stuff starts happening. The kids find a secret tea party in the woods, Maddie winds up poisoned and vomiting, there are scary noises and an unknown presence in the house, and pretty soon Laura sees a masked guy waving from the driveway. Shawn still hasn’t arrived, and Laura needs to get Maddie to a doctor, but of course Masked Guy has disabled the car (in a more exciting manner than usual, I might add), so the terrified family tries to hole up and wait for Dad to show up and save the day. You can probably guess how that turns out, so it’s up to Laura and the kids to survive until morning.

Like I said, there’s a lot to dislike about He’s Out There beyond the generic title. Its undersaturated palette jives with my personal aesthetic, but it makes the film look like it wants to be a Zack Snyder movie. Its plot relies on numerous conveniences of the laziest slasher writing—the psychic killer, the teleporting killer, Owen Exposition, the Guy Showing Up to Save You Who Is Immediately Eviscerated, the Other Guy Showing Up to Save You Who Immediately Has His Arms Ripped Off, etc.—and also has more holes in it than a camp counselor on Saturday the 14th, especially in the last 15 minutes or so. And yet, despite relying heavily on slasher tropes, the movie doesn’t really succeed as a traditional slasher, because how high of a body count can you rack up when there are only six characters total? (Well, seven, if you count a store clerk with a single line who is nowhere near the action.)

Some people are also going to be irked that we never learn the killer’s whole backstory or motivation, but I think I’m mostly okay with that; it’s less satisfying narratively but probably more effective from a horror perspective. I mean, Black Christmas is a classic BECAUSE we never get the whole deal on the killer, not in spite of it. But I honestly don’t know how to feel about the killer in He’s Out There going the Michael Myers “silent but deadly” route for the entire first part of the movie and then suddenly getting an extended monologue in the third reel. It’s like seeing Jason Voorhees suddenly burst into a lesser-known Cole Porter song about heads on sticks.

Here’s the main thing, though: He’s Out There actually scared me. If you’re the right sort of viewer, it digs into some pretty raw nerves: kids being hurt because you failed to protect them, kids being terrorized while you’re powerless to help them, kids witnessing the brutal death of their parents. Most of the credit should probably go to the performers, because Yvonne Strahovski really nails it as the mom who has to lie to her kids and tell them everything’s going to be okay when she knows nothing will ever be okay again. And real-life sisters Anna and Abigail Pniowsky are perfect as Kayla and Maddie; their behaviors and reactions to the horrors befalling them are so authentic it burns.

I should mention that a lot of viewers seem to have a problem with the girls being “annoying,” but take it from the full-time primary caregiver of a daughter since her birth: those kids are just acting like actual kids. And my experience is not limited to parenthood, either; I was also an in-class kindergarten helper and a Girl Scout Leader from Brownies up through 8th grade, and our Brownie troop of two dozen girls at one point included THREE sets of twins. So yeah, I think I have a pretty well-informed opinion when I say that the sisters in He’s Out There acted pretty much exactly as I think most sisters that age would behave in their unbearable situation, and it’s tough to watch in exactly the way it should be.

So there you go: if you’re looking for a by-the-numbers slasher flick with a lot of gore and body parts piled to the heavens, this isn’t the movie for you. Likewise, if you dislike kids or find them irritating, you’re going to find He’s Out There both formulaic AND annoying. But if you’re a parent, or you like kids, or you have enough empathy to imagine what it would be like to be, say, seven years old and rely on your parents for safety and security only to sense their own mortal terror or witness their helpless demise at the hands of the Bogeyman, well… pleasant nightmares.

feeling: ambivalent

Movie: Wishmaster (1997), directed by Robert Kurtzman

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.05 miles, 8’51”/mile, 01:02:25 (recovery run)

Seeing as I was still sort of mired in late-’90s nostalgia (trust me, it beats living in 2020), I figured I’d revisit another title, but this time maybe one that wasn’t one of the umpteen Scream-inspired teen slashers of the era. Nothing against messy and mysterious serial killers stalking oddly attractive-yet-mature-looking high school “kids,” but that spiel can wear thin after a while. I wanted something a little more monster-y, a bit more special-effects-y; a little less Hollywood and a lot more Horror-fan. So what else but Wishmaster to the rescue? I mean, come on, there are like a half-dozen big names in horror attached to this flick, from Wes Craven executive-producing to Robert Englund in a major role all the way down to a cameo in a drug store by special effects legend Tom Savini. Clearly Wishmaster was made for people who like scary movies.

So what do horror fans get for tuning in? Well, for starters, how about an expository intro narrated by none other than Phantasm’s Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm? He obligingly informs us that Djinn aren’t happy-go-lucky genies, but rather nasty-ass DEMONS trying to take over our world by granting “Monkey’s Paw” wishes to the hapless humans who wake them: “Fear one thing in all there is: fear the Djinn. BOY.” Then we get to see the whole “be careful what you wish for” dynamic in play, as the Djinn of the title wreaks havoc at the 12th-century shindig of a Persian emperor in an orgy of the best (or, at least, most excessive and gratuitous) special effects 1997 had to offer. But before the Djinn can grant the third wish that will doom mankind, the court sorcerer magically binds him into a pretty red gem that may or may not be a cherry Ring Pop.

Cut to the Present Day of 23 years ago! You know it’s 1997 because everybody’s smoking and only a few people have cell phones. A priceless antique statue is being unloaded from a ship when a drunk crane operator drops the crate on Sam Raimi’s brother Ted, destroying both the statue and Ted’s chances of ever escaping his big brother’s shadow. But what’s this? Inside the statue was hidden the ~~Ring Pop~~ fire opal that houses the Djinn, which is promptly stolen by a dock worker and pawned. The pawn shop owner takes it to be appraised, and that’s how it winds up in the hands of Our Heroine, Alex, a Feisty ’90s Woman who smokes like everyone else but doesn’t have a cell phone. She is, however, an expert on gems, but even she’s never seen anything like this, so she takes it to her lovestruck scientist buddy Josh Friendzone, who zaps it with a laser and frees the Djinn while Alex is off imparting Chekhov’s Zen Basketball Wisdom to the girls’ team she coaches.

What follows is a lot of Alex trying to Nancy Drew the Mystery of the Exploding Ring Pop while the Djinn steals a human face and tries to locate his awakener Alex in order to grant her three wishes and unleash hell on earth. As you can imagine, this entails the Djinn granting a whole lot of ill-advised wishes to random people he meets, because the studio put “Be Careful What You Wish For” on the movie poster so now they have to beat that theme INTO THE FREAKIN’ GROUND—which means you get to see Tony “Candyman” Todd as an ill-fated bouncer and Kane “Beefiest Jason” Hodder as a security guard who gets turned into bad CGI glass and shattered, so hey. Eventually Alex and the Djinn meet face to face, there’s a bunch of Hellraiser-y chaos as he tries to get her to make three wishes and doom the planet, and Alex finds herself in a bit of a pickle—will Zen Basketball Wisdom save the day?

All snark aside, I have a soft spot for this flick, which I’ve seen many times over the past quarter-century or so. While watching it I get the sense that everyone involved was having fun; somehow it feels about equal parts labor of love and cynical cash grab, and that works for me. I mean, it’s not like we can say we shouldn’t have expected a horror movie about djinns by then, right? Once Leprechaun made back like triple its budget in its opening weekend, strip-mining cultural mythologies for scary ideas was going to be a trend and of course they’d get around to djinns sooner or later.

There’s also something endearing about a movie whose prime directive was apparently MOAR SPECIAL EFFECTS, because it was made at a time when the divide between good and bad effects was especially wide, and the vast chasm is fully on display here. Many of the practical effects are killer, but some are definitely Buffy-era TV-budget dude-in-a-rubber-suit quality. Meanwhile, some of the digital effects hold up surprisingly well after nearly a quarter century, while others… don’t. At all. Whether you laugh or cringe will probably depend on how drunk you are.

Wishmaster wears its imperfections proudly. It has a decent premise that gives rise to a promising plot—which then yields to the movie’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, oh-heck-throw-in-the-sink-too, actually-you-know-what-add-three-more-sinks-just-in-case philosophy and accordingly falls down at the end, painting itself into a corner so tight only a time travel paradox can fix it with a weirdly happy ending. Even though it’s tantamount to the “it was all a dream!” gambit, somehow you feel sort of okay with that, because you feel like the movie is okay with that. Actually, Wishmaster seems like it feels that way about everything. And what’s more ’90s than a personal affirmation?

3.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

feeling: nostalgic

Movie: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), directed by Jim Gillespie

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.58 miles, 8’36”/mile, 01:05:17 (recovery run)

This past weekend I was interviewed about a project I worked on wayyyyyy back in 1997, so I was in a bit of a nostalgic mood for tonight’s recovery run. Accordingly, I cued up that bygone year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, set the treadmill to a slow lope, and pressed play… and immediately proceeded to LOSE MY EVERLOVIN’ MIND, because somehow I had completely repressed the knowledge that this movie kicks off with a crappy nu-metal cover of “Summer Breeze.” Seriously. If I didn’t already know this movie ain’t half bad, I’d have to buckle myself in for a ’90s-Style Sucktacular.

No, honestly, it’s really not bad! I mean yeah, it’s almost painfully ’90s, with the requisite soundtrack of ironic cover songs and a cast of the A-list heartthrobs that dominated the teen-flick renaissance of the era. And granted, the ill-fitting undergarments and interestingly-chosen camera angles lead me to think of it as I Know What Your Cleavage Did Last Summer, while the script by Kevin Williamson is pretty much just a feature-length horror episode of Dawson’s Eek. But let’s be honest, here: an awful lot of horror succeeds in spite of (or sometimes because of) being stuffed to the gullet with camp and/or cringe. So let’s dive in, shall we?

For the uninitiated, IKWYDLS is about four impossibly attractive “teens” (seriously, one of them is a literal beauty queen who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar, go figure) who get drunk while celebrating their charmed lives. But then, WHOOPSY-DAISY, they run over some guy and decide the only way to keep from destroying their impossibly bright futures with a manslaughter charge is to dump the body in the ocean and tell no one. Fast-forward to one year later, they’re all back in town for the summer, their impossibly bright futures have all been derailed by guilt, and now on top of that they’re receiving little anonymous love notes implying that the writer is, shall we say, aware of activities in which they partook during the warmer months of the prior year. The icing on the cake is that now they’re also being stalked, harassed, and eventually targeted for murder by a revenge-crazed Gorton’s Fisherman.

So much for the setup. The way it plays out is pretty familiar territory for anyone who saw Scream or any of the zillion Hollywood teen horror flicks that its box-office success inspired: IKWYDLS is basically a Scooby Doo mystery (starring not one, but TWO future Mystery Machine occupants) with some scares and some occasionally grisly deaths. Main character (and main cleavage) Julie leads her friends on a chase to discover more about the man they killed, in hopes that they can discover who might be coming after them. Where it differs a bit from the standard teen slasher is that the killer isn’t killing THEM off—at least, not right away. He’s mostly hitting them with cars and putting them in the hospital, or hiding in their bedrooms and cutting off some of their hair while they sleep. Sure, he kills an acquaintance or two just to show he means business, but you really don’t start to see the conspirators adding to the body count until maybe two-thirds in. It’s mostly an exercise in paranoia and turning friends against one another, and it works pretty well.

That’s not to say it’s even remotely perfect: the cast is strong, and Williamson is generally no slouch as a writer, but the characters here are written to type (I assume because this is “genre fiction”), so everyone’s got to cleave to a pretty thin stereotype. The plot also relies a lot on the trope of the omnipotent secret killer, what with bodies disappearing without a trace in a matter of seconds, and the bad guy seemingly teleporting at his convenience to suit the jump scare. And the disguise of the killer is both laughably unscary and a major plot crutch. (Really, Kevin Williamson? During a July 4th parade in North Carolina, in the middle of a sunny afternoon with temperatures in the mid-90s, there are gonna be SEVERAL people wearing rain slickers and hats so we don’t know which one is the killer? Really?) Also the cat-and-mouse chases are oddly dull, and the ending is completely ’80s-style horror generic.

And yet, I can’t talk myself out of liking IKWYDLS at least a little. Watch it as a nostalgia trip, watch it to see a bunch of teen stars yell at each other about something other than who’s going to be prom queen, watch it for the throwaway Dawson’s Creek references and the one time it gets kinda real about how most impossibly bright futures look a good deal dimmer a year after high school graduation. Don’t worry—the “Summer Breeze” cover is over pretty quickly.

feeling: just fine

Movie: Candy Corn (2019), directed by Josh Hasty

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.54 miles, 8’23”/mile, 01:03:12 (recovery run)

This was my first indoor run of the fall, boils and ghouls! Around here, the houses start getting decked out for Halloween pretty much right after the equinox, so the neighborhood lawns are already sprouting inflatable jack-o’-lanterns and the hedges are covered in that dorky-looking fake spiderwebbing, and that’s A-OK with me. As far as I’m concerned, as soon as August is off the calendar I’m running around yelling “it’s HalloWEEEEEN!!” at strangers in the street and counting down the days until October’s monthlong flood of scary movies on all channels. I don’t even care that they’re edited for television. Sometimes that’s part of the fun.

Sadly, it’s not October yet, but since ’tis still the season and all that, I wanted a Halloween-themed movie to run to tonight:ideally something fresh and unfamiliar to get my mind off my cooked quads (last night’s run included a mile and a half of steep uphill), but still easy enough to follow that I wouldn’t miss anything too important when wiping sweat out of my eyes or getting distracted by something shiny. After poking around through a few streaming services, I settled on Candy Corn, which turned out to fit the bill nicely.

Here’s the guts: Mike, Bobby, and Steve are three young ne’er-do-wells sitting in a small-town diner planning their annual bullying of Jacob, the local special needs kid—which is apparently a longstanding Halloween tradition I somehow missed, but whatever. Steve’s girlfriend Carol “I Could Do Better” Saperstein unsuccessfully tries to dissuade them, and the next day the Thug Patrol (comprising our three miscreants plus a Sad Diner Loser named Gus) confronts Jacob at the carnival where he works. Jacob fights back, things get out of hand, and the thugs beat Jacob to death and flee the scene. As it turns out, though, like all traveling carnivals, this one is run by a diminutive necromancer named Dr. Death, who handily resurrects Jacob as a masked instrument of vengeance. Never mess with a carny, folks!

What follows is a by-the-numbers affair in which each of the thugs, and even the guilty-by-association Carol, are isolated and killed by Jacob one by one in borderline inventive ways—tongues ripped out, spines ripped out, any number of things ripped out—usually after they spot his trademark jack-o-lantern full of—you guessed it—candy corn. Meanwhile, Head Thug Mike just happens to be the son of the local sheriff, who tries to unravel the mystery of the sudden spate of murders in this normally sleepy town; will he discover the carnival’s terrifying secret in time? And I doubt I’m spoiling anything for anyone when I say the answer is no, of course he doesn’t, because this movie ends exactly the way you expect it to.

I mean, it is what it is, and what it is is a Halloween movie. It has, for example, the most perfunctory gratuitous nudity ever seen just because it had to tick that box. The writing is marginal and certainly not original, but then it’s clearly an homage to what came before, so take that for what it’s worth. The characterizations are, for the most part, paper-thin—especially for the bullies, so that as they’re picked off one by one, it’s hard to care. Mostly you cheer, I guess, because… bullies? But they were more like props then people so it didn’t really matter much one way or the other. You maybe feel a little sorry for Carol every once in a while, but then she keeps making out with Steve ON PURPOSE and you’re like, okay, she’s digging her own grave, here.

The acting is passable, with two notable exceptions. First, the guy who plays Head Thug Mike is just appallingly awful, which I would like to believe was intentional because every Halloween movie needs that one terrible actor for everyone to make fun of. Second, Pancho Moler is punching way above his weight (note: not a short joke) as Dr. Death, and to its credit, the film gives him a fair bit of screen time, because he’s the heart and soul of this flick, and I could watch him insult the police all day long. Meanwhile, if there were any doubt that Candy Corn is a movie made for horror fans by horror fans, it’s worth nothing that genre mainstay Tony Todd has a small but non-spooky part as one of the carnies (he’s also an executive producer), and P.J. Soles of Halloween and Carrie fame does a fine job as Marcy the police dispatcher.

For a low-budget indie endeavor, Candy Corn has a surprisingly high production value, though of course the ’70s-nostalgia feel helps a bit with that. There’s a little CGI for some extra blood spurts, I think, but otherwise what gore there is seems to be good old-fashioned practical effects, and done reasonably well and with love; the only real standout, effects-wise, is probably the design and execution of Jacob’s back-from-the-dead masked avenger look, which is stellar.

Bottom line, there’s not all that much going on… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Candy Corn is a good Halloween movie: it conjures the feeling of the holiday; it knows, loves, and exploits the tropes of the genre; and it’s uncomplicated enough that you’re not going to miss much when it’s your turn to get up and dole out candy to the trick-or-treaters who just rang the bell. As long as your expectations are modest, this is a decent popcorn flick for a Halloween night.

feeling: HalloWEEEEEN!!

Movie: 1BR (2019), directed by David Marmor

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.37 miles, 8’54”/mile, 01:05:40 (recovery run)

Have you noticed that I seem to be skewing pretty recent with my movie choices overall? Well, consider me the poster child of petty consistency, because tonight’s selection was no exception. 1BR is an uncomplicated little number that cuts pretty sharp, if not especially deep, and preys upon one of the fiercest, most primal fears lurking just below the surface in every human psyche: that of apartment-hunting in a modern urban housing market. AIIIIEEEEEE!!! Too real! TOO REAL!!

Well, no, not really—the actual apartment-hunting part is over pretty quickly, and it’s the aftermath that gets messy. Occasionally literally. Sarah, our protagonist, is a bit of a shrinking violet who is newly-arrived in Los Angeles to “start a new life.” She’s an aspiring costume-designer, but for now she’s got a crappy temp job and is living in a motel until she can find a place. Cut to her checking out her dream apartment in a complex where the residents give off a distinctly Stepfordy vibe, but y’know, it is an open house, after all, so, best foot forward and all that. Later on, Sarah is thrilled to find out that, thanks to her kindness in helping one of the elderly residents, she was selected as the new tenant for the highly-coveted vacancy. Now all she has to do is move in without her overly helpful cute new neighbor spotting the forbidden cat she’s hiding, and she’s golden.

Or she would be, if not for that one creepy resident who tries to push weird life-changing literature about “community” onto her, and the noise from banging pipes (which no one else seems to hear) keeping her from sleeping. Oh, and someone or something coming into her place in the middle of the night. And the note shoved under her door about her harboring an illicit cat. And then… well, it’s kinda hard to talk about what happens next, because literally everything that happens for the rest of the movie would be considered a massive spoiler. It’s sorta like trying to review The Matrix but not being allowed to talk about anything that happens after Neo takes the red pill. The coy thing would be to say that “things are not what they seem,” except, let’s get real, things are TOTALLY how they seemed. Those neighbors were way too shiny-happy for this not to have gone the way it did. If I say I think this flick might someday be considered a “cult classic,” is that too on the nose?…

1BR starts out in Spookyville, takes a hard left straight into Nasty Heights, and then rides out the rest of the runtime tooling along through Anxiety Town. There’s a bit of gore, and some unsettling violence, but that’s definitely not the focus. This is more a sort of “social horror,” in that the nightmare comes from people being awful—not an individual going serial killer like in American Psycho, or even a group of murderers like Rob Zombie’s Firefly family, but more the sort of thing like the community at large turning against its own members. Think Lord of the Flies, "The Lottery," stuff like that. The fear stems from people being social creatures who depend on their societies, and then having those societies turn against them.

That said, 1BR might be even scarier for the antisocial set. If you’re the sort of introvert who, say, runs alone on a treadmill while watching Netflix and harbors vague suspicions about the neighbors under even the best of circumstances, you may well be less wigged out by 1BR’s graphic depictions of psychological and physical torture than by its even-more graphic depictions of open-house housing application procedures and meet-’n’-greet barbecues. (If you are unsure what my decision would be if forced to choose between undergoing textbook brainwash torment and learning the names of the nice middle-aged couple in 3D, I would remind you that at least no one’s expecting you to smile pretty while they nail your hands to the wall.)

The script is decent and original though maybe a bit shallow, which means it’s no surprise that the acting is competent if not outstanding. Overall, 1BR is a solid piece of entertainment that plays effectively to some pretty raw fears, though it probably won’t have you thinking too hard about the origins, ramifications, and nuances of those fears. And it doesn’t need to! Not everything has to turn your worldview upside down to be worthwhile, and 1BR turned out to be a nice choice for a night on which I was a Bear of Very Little Brain.

3.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

feeling: little brain

Movie: Color Out of Space (2019), directed by Richard Stanley

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.09 miles, 8’47”/mile, 01:02:13 (recovery run)

I was wondering what I should watch tonight when a friend sent me a photo of some baguettes that got weirdly misshapen upon removal from the oven, which, if taken as a directive from on high, narrowed the field nicely: should I cue up some classic Cronenberg, or go full Lovecraftian by checking out last year’s adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space,” which had just shown up on Shudder? After a brief moment’s consideration, I opted for the latter via the following logic: since this planet is undeniably a raging dumpster fire right now, wouldn’t it be nice to take some time to consider that everything that lies beyond might be incomprehensibly worse?

And speaking of “incomprehensibly worse,” let’s talk about Color Out of Space!

Ha ha, no, actually it’s not half bad, but I can’t just throw away good segues—haven’t you heard there’s a war on? So here’s the thing about Lovecraft adaptations in general and Color Out of Space in particular: the whole point of H.P.’s brand of cosmic horror is that godlike nightmares lurk just beyond the fragile veil that separates our mundane world from the next—horrors that beggar the capacity of human comprehension. And while that concept works (arguably) well in written prose, where you can describe something as being a color no one’s ever seen before, it’s a bit trickier when you’re making a movie and have to stick that impossible color on a screen for people to look at. (In this case, they apparently just kinda shrugged and said, “let’s go with magenta.”)

The other problem with cosmic horror is that, practically by definition, it has to take itself too seriously. It relies on selling you the idea that, listen, if you actually saw the thing we’re telling you about, you would lose your mind. Again, tricky to pull off in a visual medium: “Here’s the thing! See? Isn’t it scary on an existential level? YOU ARE LOSING YOUR MIND RIGHT NOW, I CAN TELL.” And this is why I think so many film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories wind up being funny, either intentionally (because the filmmakers took the easy way out) or not (because they made a valiant effort to be genuinely terrifying and missed the mark). Color Out of Space sort of tries for a hybrid approach; it certainly feels like it’s trying to be deeply unsettling (and sometimes it succeeds), but it undermines its own efforts by hedging its bets. For example, they named a cat “G-Spot” and, when said pussy goes missing, its owner says “you probably won’t recognize it if you find it.” So much for mood.

To that end, let’s talk about casting: if you’re trying to lend your cosmic horror film some gravitas and keep it from wandering into the realm of self-parody, you probably don’t cast Nicolas Cage in the lead role like these folks did. And even if they made that casting decision in good faith and told Mr. Cage—who is actually a fine actor capable of nuanced, understated performances—to rein in the crazy (spoiler: they didn’t; they actually told him to go all-out), they probably shouldn’t have also cast Tommy Chong as an acid casualty aging hippie squatter. Who named his cat “G-Spot.”

It may be worth noting, while we’re at it, that while I admit it has been a while since I read Lovecraft’s story, I do not recall it having an acid casualty aging hippie squatter among the dramatis personae, and so it’s safe to say that as an adaptation, Color Out of Space wanders a bit from its source material. That isn’t necessarily at all a bad thing. After all, the bones of the story are simple enough: a meteorite strikes the Gardner family farm, it releases a crazy ~~magenta~~ INDESCRIBABLY-COLORED light show, it gets struck by a whole lotta lightning and disappears, and then weird changes start happening to the local flora and fauna before the Gardners descend into madness and everything is ruined forever—and on that level, Color Out of Space is a faithful adaptation. Its story has been modernized, to be sure, and spends more time on characterization: Nelson just wants to milk his expensive alpacas; his wife Theresa is a cancer survivor and finance whiz; their daughter Lavinia is a junk-food-loving Wiccan who misses the city; teen son Benny likes space and gets stoned a lot; and little Jack likes dinosaurs. All that makes you care a bit more once the bad stuff starts kicking in after a slow twenty minutes, but maybe not enough to sell the cosmic horror angle.

But! Color Out of Space DOES work very effectively as a Cronenbergian body horror death march. It starts out relatively slow—a horrible odor that only Nelson can smell, attacks of catatonia and lost time, inexplicable headaches and the like. But before too long, Theresa is cutting off her own fingers, Lavinia is carving runes into her flesh with a box-cutter and bleeding into her mass-paperback edition of Necronomicon, and the alpacas have gone skinless and slimy and shoot ~~magenta~~ IMPOSSIBLY-HUED lightning at family members, which leads to a development which I won’t spoil, but which was the single thing in this movie that genuinely horrified me. Meanwhile, Nelson is going full Cage and he has a shotgun, so you know this can only end well.

So, yes, it’s scary, or at least deeply unsettling, but maybe not in the way the best Lovecraftian horror is scary. If you go into it with tempered expectations, there’s a fair bit to like; the performances are solid and the effects are decent. As long as you’re prepared for a slow start, horror that’s more body and less cosmic, and Nic Cage being Nic Cage and Tommy Chong being Tommy Chong, this can be a pretty enjoyable ride.

feeling: meh

Movie: Satanic Panic (2019), directed by Chelsea Stardust

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.51 miles, 8’37”/mile, 01:04:47 (recovery run)

I decided to go for something modern and unfamiliar tonight in contrast to last night’s Suspiria run, and I settled on Satanic Panic, which wound up having precisely two things in common with Suspiria: 1) they both have witches in them, and 2) they are both films. Beyond that, all bets are off. That’s not to say I disliked Satanic Panic; it was a welcome change-up with some likable characters, some great lines, and a touch of wicked comedy.

Sam is a 22-year-old folk singer but busking doesn’t pay the bills, so this is her first night delivering pizzas on the back of her mint-green Vespa. It’s not going well; she gets roped into helping customers move furniture and her only tips seem to be dead men’s sweaters from racist widows. In desperation, she takes a big order outside of her delivery zone to Mill Basin, an upscale McMansion neighborhood complete with anachronistically dressed kids waving creepily on the lawns. She gets stiffed on the tip on a $100+ order (poor Sam; I could have told her that rich people are the worst tippers), but now she’s out of gas, so she enters the house in hopes of securing at least enough of a tip for gas money and finds herself in what seems to be a sort of rally for a satanic multi-level marketing plan. Unfortunately, the satanists are planning to raise Baphomet but are short one virgin for the sacrifice, so Sam is abducted as the guest of honor. Without spoiling too much, I’ll say she kindasorta escapes and teams up with the head satanist’s ex-virgin daughter Judi to foil the demon summoning, or at least survive the night.

Satanic Panic has its fair share of comedy, but it’s definitely a satanic horror flick first and foremost. When it’s funny it’s mostly darkly funny, and when it’s not funny it’s often just plain… dark. The dialogue is snappy and clever, though not especially deep. That means there are a lot of good, quotable lines, but the characterization is fairly thin throughout. Hayley Griffith reminds me of a young Lindsay Felton (old school Caitlin’s Way fans REPRESENT) and has the chops to give us a good handle on what makes Sam tick, while Ruby Modine (hey, it’s Lori from the Happy Death Day movies!) does an admirable job fleshing out her character Judi to a level beyond what the script gave her. These two are the heart of the movie, and the scene in which Sam tells her cancer story while sealing Judi’s skin against an increasingly lethal hex is a tour de force.

The supporting cast isn’t half bad either. It’s fun to see Rebecca Romijn as Big Mama Satanist—I mean, Danica—when these days I mostly know her as the host of the Hallmark Channel’s American Rescue Dog Show (which is probably the single most important annual event in my life, I am not even kidding—all hail Big Rig, 2020’s Best in Wrinkles!) And her real-life husband Jerry O’Connell makes a brief appearance playing her rapey in-movie husband Samuel, which is the sort of dumb-douchebag role I feel like I’ve seen him take up at least a few times in the past quarter-century, so I guess either he likes them or he’s good at them or both.

The take on satanism here is mostly of the predictable evil movie variety: basically one-half gross stuff being either magically expelled from or physically pulled out of bodies, and one-half rich people staying rich. (“Are you ready to make an investment in your future? Are you ready to fully commit yourselves to Satan?”) Apparently the satanic creed is “death to the weak; wealth to the strong,” which, ya know, capitalism. In that vein, there’s also a lot of improbably smart dialogue in which rich people make fun of Sam’s working class status. (“That’s a K-Mart bra so I assume you’re not one of them.”) As far as social commentary goes, Jonathan Swift it ain’t, but no one said it has to be.

It’s not likely to become a much-beloved classic, and its ending suffers from Raiders of the Lost Ark syndrome (nothing the characters does changes the outcome, which is all down to a daemon ex machina), but all in all, Satanic Panic is a more than decent romp if you’re not looking for anything too deep or too serious. Bonus Easter egg: pretty sure I spotted Some Kind of Hate playing on the TV during the babysitting scene! Maybe I’ll do a run to that soon.

Side note: Satanic Panic is the tenth horror movie I’ve written up here on Running Scared, and unless I’m mistaken, it’s the first that actually has explicit nudity in it. That’s sort of astounding, given the historical conventions of the genre. Not that I have anything against nudity in horror or otherwise, but five of the six movies I watched from this century were nudity-free and it’s nice to see that after the zillion-plus naked vampire movies of the ’60s and ’70s and the topless teen slaughterfests of the ‘70s and ‘80s, nudity is finally becoming less of a mandatory fixture. Thumbs up to variety.

feeling: wicked

Movie: Walk Away (2020), directed by Jason Dean and Matthew Nash

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 8.34 miles, 8’46”/mile, 01:13:10 (recovery run)

First off, lemme just say that this is not going to be most people’s choice for a running flick. It’s slow-paced psychological horror that meanders into philosophizing. There is little to get your heart rate up. The deaths are few and not especially graphic. That said, it had a fairly original premise and a fresh approach that kept me involved for its whole 90ish-minute run time. Also, its claustrophobia hits a little too close to the home we’re all still stuck inside. That’s right, this may not be the pandemic lockdown parable we deserved, but we got it anyway.

Walk Away (2020) Here’s the elevator pitch: picture Groundhog Day but horror, and swap in a geographical trap for the temporal one. Once these five hip young things on vacation (the women do yoga! One of the guys has a man-bun! One of them is a social media addict! etc. etc. etc.) make their way to the perfect cabin in the woods, it’s not long before one of them goes wandering off in hopes of securing enough of a cellular signal to Instagram Photophast the pics she snapped of her delightful organic barbecue plate. But as soon as she ventures just a little too far from the house, she’s —wait for it—teleported into its attic.

You would think even jaded movie stereotype millennials might be more than a little freaked out by this, but these five take it oddly in stride, and even systematically plot the limits around the house and experiment with what happens when someone’s already in the attic and another is teleported. The two dudes are even thrilled to discover that the fridge is mysteriously self-restocking, meaning free beer forever. Indeed, they only really seem to start to panic when someone points out that eventually they’re going to run out of toilet paper.

And so they can’t leave, they can’t communicate with the outside world, and eventually the passage of time wears upon their souls, they get on each other’s nerves, and a shot of a squeezed-out toothpaste tube and an empty toilet paper roll signal to the viewer that, yep, someone’s gonna die. (See what I mean about the pandemic?)

I liked this more than most people, it seems. It reminded me a bit of Cube, in the sense that a bunch of regular people are stuck together in a bizarre prison beyond their comprehension and the practical and philosophical questions of who’s behind it and why are ultimately pointless. (Also in that the ending is either deep, or just hoping people think it’s deep. The jury’s still out for me.) The conceit of a place that people can’t leave because whenever they try they always find themselves back where they started is not a unique one—see Southbound, Identity, The Final Girls, etc.—but it hasn’t been run into the ground as hard as many others. I would hazard to say this is distinctly unlike any other “cabin in the woods” movie you’ve seen, and if you’re like me, you’ve seen quite a few.

Also, it’s a pretty good-looking film. There are some beautiful sun-drenched idyllic shots of the cabin and its environs, as befits a story in which it’s the perfection of the cabin that is its poison. Yes, it has a certain art-school student film vibe to it, but I don’t necessarily mean that as a put-down. It’s true that sometimes the symbolism is a little on the nose—sooooo many shots of insects dying in spider webs, sooooo many books that wink broadly at the themes, e.g. Lord of the Flies and Sartre’s No Exit (which appeared onscreen about twenty minutes after I’d commented to myself “L’infer, c’est les autres”; they really didn’t need to hit us over the head with it). But there’s an earnestness to it all that’s ultimately charming.

If you’re a typical horror fan, you may detest this. If you have a soft spot for the oddballs and the slow-burns, though (did you like Cube, or did it infuriate you?), give it a whirl. No guarantees. And if you’re going to run while watching it, don’t expect it to spur you to any speed records; save it for a recovery run.

feeling: contemplative

Movie: The Shed (2019), directed by Frank Sabatella
Watched on: Shudder
Ran: 7.54 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:07:58 (recovery run)

I was looking for something made recently and that I didn’t know anything about, but that would have some sort of supernatural element to it and not just be human-dude-with-a-chainsaw or whatever, since I'd done the serial-killer thing last night. I watched the trailer for The Shed and it fit the bill.

Basic plot: Stan is an orphan on probation with a month to go to adulthood, and lives in near-poverty with his abusive grandfather. He and his best friend Dommer (heh) are bullied constantly at school. Stan discovers that a vampire is living in his grandfather’s shed, like ya do. Dommer thinks the answer to their bullying problem is to feed bullies to the shed-vamp, but Stan is less than certain. People go missing, the local sheriff gets suspicious, Stan’s crush Roxy wonders what’s up with him, bodies start piling up (figuratively speaking), there’s a whole running-home-through-back-yards-to-beat-the-adult-driving-there sequence that would do Ferris Bueller proud, we eventually arrive at the inevitable showdown at the ol’ homestead, and like in a lot of films of this ilk, the last five seconds of the movie had me asking “wait, what?”

Interestingly I’ve seen some criticism that this flick isn’t “modern” and the characters act like they’re from the ‘80s or ‘90s. While I don’t think it’s explicitly a period piece, I personally had gotten the impression that this was intentionally set in the early ‘90s (no smartphones—or any cell phones—in sight, grunge fashion choices, etc.), and I find the lack of a caption stating “AMERICA, 1991” or something pretty cool. It’s nice to be kept guessing a bit on that front.

I should note the story relies—not once, but twice—on the plot device of a character not seeing a severed arm clearly lying on the ground pretty much right in front of them in broad daylight until the plot demands it. (Also, I’m not sure, but I think the arm disappears and reappears between shots at some point. Which, you know, would explain the whole “wait, is that an arm?” thing, I guess.) Bonus points for the band names on the photocopied punk show flyers duct-taped to Stan’s bedroom walls, though I was a little put out to notice that Stan had put up no fewer than four identical copies of a single flyer, which doesn’t strike me as a thing anyone would do.

Overall, though, thumbs up. It ain’t high art and I won’t be pondering it for long, but I did enjoy the flick, I was rooting for the heroes and against the jerks, the hour on the treadmill passed quickly, and I am eternally in love with Roxy. Get yourself a girlfriend who’ll help you carry a vampire corpse. Not to mention one who will ( [spoilers] )

feeling: amused

most recent entries

Carnival of Souls (1962)
Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)
A Creepshow Animated Special (2020)
Cherry Tree (2015)
Monster Party (2018)
Urban Legend (1998)
Vacancy (2007)
Lace Crater (2016)
Spider Baby (1967)
He’s Out There (2018)
Wishmaster (1997)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Candy Corn (2019)
1BR (2019)
Color Out of Space (2019)
Satanic Panic (2019)
Walk Away (2020)
The Shed (2019)

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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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