runningscared: Body Horror (body horror)
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)
 
Are We Not Cats (2016)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.
 
4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet
runningscared: halloween icon (halloween)
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)
 
Night of the Demons (1988)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.
 
4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet
runningscared: bloody hands (bloody hands)
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.
 
Hatcher (2006)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.”
 
4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet
runningscared: madness icon (madness)
Movie: Scare Me (2020), directed by Josh Ruben
Watched on: Shudder
Ran: 7.29 miles, 8’51”/mile, 01:04:31 (recovery run)
 
Scare Me (2020)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.
 
4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

Eli (2019)

Oct. 28th, 2020 11:59 pm
runningscared: haunted house icon (haunted house)
Movie: Eli (2019), directed by Ciarán Foy
Watched on: Netflix
Ran: 7.14 miles, 9’12”/mile, 01:05:44 (recovery run)
 
Eli (2019)You guys. You guys. It is FANTASTIC living under my rock! Seriously, I get to see so many movies while knowing absolutely nothing whatsoever about them, and every once in a while that blissful ignorance really pays off. Tonight, for example, I left my nightly run ’til pretty late, so I was hard-pressed to pick a movie quickly enough to finish my seven miles by midnight. Since it had been literally weeks since I’d run to anything on Netflix, I was scrolling through the Horror section during my warm-up walk and finally settled on Eli. I knew nothing about Eli.
 
I know, crazy, right? Because as soon as I finished my run I immediately started poking around online, and it was obvious that EVERYBODY has known about Eli for over a year now. Which means everybody knew it had a twist ending, and everybody also knew that said twist ending was highly polarizing, and either the thing that ruined an otherwise terrific movie or the best thing since someone figured out you could use something called a “knife” on bread instead of just stuffing the entire loaf down one’s aching gullet. I number myself among the latter. If fact, I go further than that, because Eli contains several twists along with The Big One, and I think they’re all pretty keen.
 
Eli, as if your non-beneath-rock-dwelling self didn’t know, is about a boy with an autoimmune disorder that requires him to live in plastic bubbles and makeshift hazmat suits. Venturing outside without protection from irritants triggers immediate skin rashes and respiratory distress that would kill him. As a last-ditch effort to give Eli a normal life, his parents drive him to a special “clean house” medical facility, where a Dr. Horn reportedly has a 100% cure rate performing groundbreaking gene therapy on people with Eli’s condition. Life is rough for Eli right off the bat; his gene therapy treatments are super-painful, and the medication he’s on can cause nightmares and hallucinations—which means that all the oh-I-don’t-know GHOSTS he keeps seeing are laughed off by the grown-ups as just an unfortunate side-effect.  
 
Luckily, he’s befriended a local girl, Haley, who chucks pebbles at his windows in the night so he can come downstairs and speak to her through the glass of a big ol’ window. Haley believes Eli about the ghosts, and also notes that she’s spoken to other kids who have been patients there—they, too, saw ghosts, and none of them ever came out cured. Now Eli’s initial suspicions of Dr. Horn’s motives are amped to 11, and meanwhile, the ghosts have started messing with him in increasingly intrusive ways, culminating in dragging him down the halls and trying to throw him out of the house unprotected. However, he’s also figured out that they had been trying to give him the code to Dr. Horn’s medical records room. Are they trying to hurt him, or help him?
 
Therein lies the effectiveness of the multiple twists in Eli: they’re all about trust and whether it’s misplaced. Eli is a child, and an immunocompromised one at that; he is the poster child of helplessness. The horror he faces is that the people he relies on may not have his best interests at heart. This plays out throughout the film with his parents, each of whom he has reason to suspect of falsehood and betrayal on multiple different occasions. There’s a constant whipsawing of loyalties as every single entity in Eli’s world, corporeal or not, might be on his side or might be out to get him. Heck, with all the drugs he’s taking, he can’t even trust his own judgment… but by the time “the” twist comes around, Eli’s going to have to rely on his own power to escape with his life. I wish I could say more, but the less you know when you see this, the better. Just, y’know… trust me.
 
Eli isn’t a perfect film, even if you like the hard left turn it makes near the end, like I do. There are a lot of… well, I wouldn’t call them plot holes, exactly, but more like unlikely conveniences without which the plot can’t function. For instance, most kids who have had just had bone punches in their hips or invasive skull surgery aren’t going to be running around sprightly and free to fight rambunctious ghosts and play Hardy Boys. This comes down to a writing issue, I think—Eli’s treatment could just have easily been something far less invasive, but they wanted the medical horror on top of the ghost story AND the kid-beset-from-all-sides angle, and everything is a little bit weaker as a consequence. Still, I find the film's shortcomings pretty minor in light of its overall effect.
 
If you’re not a fan of surprises or genre crossovers, you’d probably do well to give Eli a miss. If you like horror that isn’t afraid to break the rules, I think you’ll find a lot to like, including the fact that Haley is played by the zoomer from Stranger Things. Enjoy!

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet
 
runningscared: technology icon (technology)
Movie: Host (2020), directed by Rob Savage
Watched on: Shudder
Ran: 7.05 miles, 9’23”/mile, 01:06:08 (slow recovery run)
 
Host (2020)I only had time to squeeze in a quick movie during my recovery run tonight, folks, because it’s FAMILY ZOOM NIGHT! And what better way to prepare for that terrifying prospect than to check out the first (sort-of-)feature-length horror flick shot entirely in Zoom during COVID-19 lockdown? Yes, tonight’s movie was Host, Shudder’s exclusive socially distanced paranormal freakout, and it is a masterclass in how to make good things come in small packages. Clocking in at under an hour, Host delivers some solid scares and then gets gone while the getting’s good.
 
The premise is bare-bones, as befits such a short piece: six friends on pandemic lockdown get together on Zoom and bring in a psychic to have some fun with a virtual seance. Almost none of them takes it seriously, going so far as to secretly mock the medium with a drinking game. Their cavalier attitude, however, leads to a demonic entity swooping in after they’ve opened the gates to the astral plane (drink!) to mess with them in increasingly scary and violent ways. After that it’s just a matter of seeing whether any of them survives long enough to see the Zoom meeting hit its free membership time limit.
 
I’m pretty sure the notion of confining a horror film entirely to what happens on a computer screen was pioneered by Unfriended in 2014, and in my admittedly incomplete experience, it hadn’t been done better since. Host might have changed that, though a direct comparison is unfair, since the two films are very different animals. Unfriended is a ghost story that’s really about teens using social media to be awful to each other in ever more efficient ways, which might limit its most affected audience to a certain demographic. Host, on the other hand, uses the entire Zoom experience as the foundation of anxiety upon which it builds its terror.
 
It’s an obvious strategy, maybe, but no less brilliant for that: so many people now suddenly rely on this platform on a daily basis for school and work, as well as for whatever ersatz virtual “happy hours” that pass for socialization but are now indistinguishable from, um, school and work. And everything else universally associated with lockdown—the loneliness of isolation, the claustrophobia of being trapped with a housemate, the often unspoken but internalized fear of an invisible and unstoppable killer—has become inextricably intertwined in the collective unconscious with the rites and rituals of the Zoom call. It’s a fat vein to tap.
 
What this means is that everything about Host’s slow build is recognizable, relatable, and sets one’s teeth on edge: the privacy tape being peeled off the webcam, the horrible feedback when someone joins the meeting on a laptop when she’s already connected on her smartphone, people trying too hard to seem happy, people trying too hard to be seen living fabulous lifestyles in fabulous locales. Host is not about escapism. The “characters” are using their actors’ real names. There’s a lot of drinking, a cohabitant getting snippy and banishing himself to the bedroom, and an elderly relative playing fast and loose with the distancing guidelines. By the time the spooky stuff kicks in, you’re already worked up over the horror of what real life has become—yours and everybody else’s.
 
When the really demonic action begins, it’s effective. Part of that is because you can never really be sure of what you see over a highly compressed Internet video feed. Host’s Zoom format also yields some genuinely unique and brilliant touches, such as the way a custom Zoom video background serves as an obscuring curtain so we can’t see the real horror behind it; it sets up the right kind of jump scare, while also letting us appreciate the irony of the looping video showing the character still alive and walking mundanely around her apartment. Also note the use of novelty Snap filters both for comedic and horrific effect (as they are applied over terrified and dying faces) and for plot (when Snap applies a filter to a face it’s detected in midair when no one’s visible on camera).
 
I don’t mean to say that Host is a perfect movie overall, but it deftly exploits our newly-shared expectations, frustrations, and dread of what passes for human interaction in Zoom, and hangs it all on the skeleton that is the underlying horror of every aspect of 2020’s “new normal.” I have a theory about why the reaction to Host has been so polarized: people who applaud it have accepted and assimilated the nightmare a certain little virus has made of all of our lives, while people who write it off as “just another found-footage ghost story” are still in denial about just how much higher the bodies will be piled. Which one are you? If you have 56 minutes to spare, I know how you can find out.
 
If nothing else, it might make your Family Zoom Night seem less scary by comparison.

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet
runningscared: classic icon (classic)
Movie: Theater of Blood (1973), directed by Douglas Hickox
Watched on: Shudder
Ran: 6.67 miles, 8’21”/mile, 55:44 (quick run)
 
Theater of Blood (1973)And now a public service announcement from Running Scared: a varied diet is the key to a healthy constitution! Splatter, zombies, giallo, torture porn, possession, found footage—there’s lots of diversity across the horror spectrum, and chances are you know what you like and you chow down accordingly. But even if you’re careful to enjoy a hearty mix of genres, are you getting your recommended number of servings of… classics? I know, I know, some may consider them the Brussels sprouts of horror films—rich in context and good for you, but tough to choke down. That’s not necessarily true, though! After all, there are horror classics of all types out there, so unless your tastes keep to an extremely narrow lane, the odds are good you’ll find some nourishing classics that taste great too.
 
For example, may I recommend Theater of Blood? It’s a serial killer/revenge flick for the drama nerd set: someone is bumping off the theater critics of London in tremendously colorful fashion, and before too long, the head of the Critic’s Circle notices that each murder appears to be taken straight from a Shakespeare play. Even more intriguing, the order of the deaths matches the order of the plays in the final repertory season of the notoriously overacting Edward Lionheart, who, when snubbed by the Circle at an awards ceremony two years prior, took his own life by leaping into the Thames (after reciting a Hamlet soliloquy, of course). Could his grieving daughter Edwina be the culprit? Or is there a very good reason why Edward’s body was never recovered?
 
The first thing I have to praise is a stellar cast—I plead ignorance of most of the ’70s-era heavy-hitters in this extremely British film, but the headliners are known to all. No less a horror god than Vincent Price himself is the aggrieved ham Lionheart, and since Price is one of those actors who only ever really plays himself, it’s nice that the role fits him like a skin-tight catsuit. Speaking of catsuits, the always-luminescent Diana Rigg plays his devoted daughter Edwina and kicks as much butt as you would expect of an ex-Avenger—no, not those Avengers, though Black Widow does owe much to Emma Peel and her wardrobe. Ms. Rigg passed away just last month, so there’s another reason to watch what was reportedly what she thought was the best of the many films she made. (The only other actor I recognized was Milo O’Shea as Inspector Boot; he was Durand Durand in Barbarella, and I guess those really WERE his eyebrows.)
 
But there is so much more to like here than just the acting. The premise is simple and engaging, the cinematography is weirdly lush, and the writing is sharp as the many, many blades that appear onscreen. Overall, the single word that best fits the film is “wicked.” If you’re a fan of modern movies with elaborate and gnarly themed murders, like Se7en or the Saw flicks, you might well consider this an ancestor, as each murder fits the victim and is also a modernized twist on deaths culled from the dramatic works of Shakespeare—which also means that most of the deaths are gory and disturbing because, in case you didn’t know, Shakespeare was frickin’ metal, dude. We’re talking drowning in wine, electrocution by hair curlers (as a stand-in for burnings at the stake), being force-fed one’s own beloved dogs, etc.
 
While the murders are grisly, they aren’t especially scary, as Theater of Blood is so camp that Jason Voorhees keeps watching it looking for counselors to machete. The bright colors and the overall tone remind me of a Hanna Barbera cartoon, you’ll see the most bumbling police outside of a Keystone Kops number, there’s a homing device with a big red button that’s straight out of a ’60s-era Batman TV episode, and if you never realized that you NEED to see Vincent Price portray Bob Ross from an alternative timeline in which he’s a gay hairdresser instead of an oil painter, trust me: 1) you absolutely do; and 2) congratulations, you’ve come to the right place.
 
So no, Theater of Blood is unlikely to send much of a shiver up your spine; if anything, it’s more of a ’70s parody of horror films than a horror film itself. And why is that a bad thing? Sure, the sheer joy of everyone involved just drips off the screen—I haven’t even mentioned the FENCING DUEL on TRAMPOLINES—but still, I say any movie with Vincent Price holding aloft a visibly steaming human heart he’s just cut from the chest of his enemy qualifies as horror, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Plus, where else are you ever gonna see Vincent Price do Shakespeare?
 
Give it a try. And mix in some other classics while you’re at it. It’ll do you a world of good. 
 
This has been a public service announcement.

4.0/5.0 bloddy severed feet

runningscared: classic icon (classic)
Movie: Village of the Damned (1960), directed by Wolf Rilla
Watched on: Turner Classic Movies
Ran: 8.34 miles, 8’01”/mile, 01:06:52 (recovery run)
 
Village of the Damned (1960)First run of October, and you know what that means: it’s Spooky Month™, so horror content starts cropping up in all sorts of places where it might not normally lurk. I was in the mood for a classic for tonight’s early recovery run, something familiar and not especially taxing. So on a hunch I took a spin through the Turner Classic Movies app, and lookee here: Village of the Damned, waiting for me like an old friend. An old, creepy-eyed, monotone-voiced friend with the Nordic blond bangs of a serial killer, sure, but an old friend nonetheless.
 
I’m talking about the 1960 original, of course—I confess I still haven’t seen the 1995 John Carpenter remake, though it’s on my (shamefully long) list, nor have I read the novel upon which the films are based, John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, but I’ve just gotten my hands on a copy and look forward to checking out that source material. Village of the Damned is a longtime favorite of mine; a lot of the older black-and-white scary movies haven’t aged especially well, and just don’t seem especially scary when viewed with a modern eye. But this one… this one still reliably raises a chill or two.
 
The movie is short, and yet even the broad strokes of its story are pretty rich. One morning, the entire English village of Midwich passes out at the exact same time—people, horses, birds, all collapsing on the spot, including local smartypants Gordon Zellaby and his wife Anthea. Anthea’s brother Alan happens to be an officer at the nearby base and has brought in the British Army to investigate when, just as suddenly, everyone wakes up again, suffering no ill effects other than some bumps and bruises and a distinct feeling of cold. It’s a mystery, but none of the army’s tests show anything amiss and everything seems back to normal… until a few months later when it turns out that every single woman in Midwich of childbearing age is pregnant. That includes Anthea Zellaby—and also the town’s virgins and the wives whose husbands were away at sea! Scandalous!
 
The mystery pregnancies progress normally, albeit more quickly than one might expect, and finally all twelve babies are born on the same day. They seem mostly normal, though they’re on the heavier side and they have disconcerting eyes. As they get a bit older, Gordon notices that their hair is flat on one side in cross-section and their nails are a little narrower than typical—and while they’re four months old, they’re as grown and developed as an 18-month-old. Oh, and we see that they’ve already developed the power to COMPEL HUMANS TO DO THEIR BIDDING. When they’re older still, Gordon tests them with a puzzle box and finds that not only are they remarkably intelligent, but they’re also a hive mind: anything one of them learns, the rest of them know. And they can still control people’s minds, but they also like chocolate, so, y’know… pretty normal, right?
 
Once they reach school age, they telepathically compel their parents to dress them alike and give them really unflattering haircuts. They can also read people’s thoughts at this point, and since they’re talking, too, they make it pretty clear that they’re 1) devoid of morals and humanity, and 2) not much fun at parties. Kids that bully them wind up “mysteriously drowned,” a guy who almost accidentally hits one of them with his car winds up “mysteriously driving full-speed into a brick wall,” etc. Once the villagers twig what’s happening, the local torch-and-Frankenstein-rake mob comes a-callin’ at the school where the kids are now living together, intending some good old-fashioned get-them-before-they-get-us, but, all too predictably, they wind up “mysteriously setting fire to themselves, lol whoops.”
 
By now, the army has learned that Midwich was not the only village that underwent a mass blackout and impregnation, though, following news that the Russians have nuked their colony, Midwich is the only outpost that survives. And the kiddos, who pointedly refuse to answer Gordon’s questions about whether there’s life on other planets, inform him that ON A COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE they’re now old enough to fan out across the country and establish new colonies, so that’ll be fun. It’s up to Gordon to come up with a plan to foil an invading enemy that knows what he’s thinking and can pull his puppet strings anytime they like. Will he succeed? And more importantly, will his awesome dog Bruno survive? (Spoiler: Bruno is fine, and SUCH A GOOD DOG, YES HE IS!)
 
So yeah, Village of the Damned is 100% science fiction, no doubt—but it’s also horrifying, both in the abstract and the concrete. For one thing, an entire village suddenly and inexplicably dropping at once—and at first we can’t know they’re only asleep and not straight-up dead—is a pretty disquieting notion. For another, most people harbor a well-placed dread of creepy children. Imagine if the selfishness and amorality of an id-driven child were somehow also in possession of a great deal of power over others. (Was that political commentary? YOU TELL ME) Add in the horrors of watching people involuntarily self-immolate or blow their heads off with a rifle, not to mention the body-horror of forced impregnation and carrying offspring without knowing what it actually is, and yep, this flick is some old-school scary stuff, cheesy 1960 special effects notwithstanding.
 
It’s also super-British. Give it a whirl.

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

runningscared: haunted house icon (haunted house)
Movie: Insidious (2010), directed by James Wan
Watched on: Netflix
Ran: 7.20 miles, 8’44”/mile, 01:02:58 (recovery run)
 
Insidious (2010)James Wan gets me. I don’t know what it is, but his particular brand of “creepy doll scares” can reliably freak me out at least a little. I wouldn’t consider Dead Silence to be an especially good film, for instance, but I love it anyway because the dolls just make me go GAHHHHHHH. Even Billy the Puppet in the Saw movies weirds me out more than I would expect. So when I checked out the clip from Insidious that Netflix uses as a preview and saw that it featured messed-up frozen-faced people in doll-type getups, I knew I should give it a shot.
 
Insidious begins as the husband-and-wife-with-2.4-kids Lambert family moves into their new house. Renai is doing most of the heavy lifting, literally and figuratively: raising her two sons and baby girl leaves her little time to follow her songwriter dreams. Almost immediately, strange things start happening around the house—first it’s little stuff, like books coming off the shelves, but soon son Dalton freaks out while exploring the attic, falls, and winds up in a medically-unexplainable coma. Fast-forward three months, and still-comatose-but-no-one-knows-why Dalton is released from the hospital for home care, which is when the real craziness starts: menacing voices on the baby monitor, bloody handprints on the bedsheets, glimpses of a horrible man peering through the windows. Husband Josh is skeptical when Renai reports these terrifying circumstances, and it isn’t until Renai is actually assaulted by the horrible man that Josh agrees to moving the family into yet another house. When it comes to unfathomable horrors, “moving twice in six months” is high on the list.
 
All is not well, however: it turns out that the ghost sightings and weird events have followed the Lamberts to the new house, and after an investigation by paranormal investigators and the involvement of a psychic, the verdict is in: Dalton is comatose because he astral-projected too far in his sleep and his essence is trapped in “The Further” while evil spirits are trying to take up residence in his vacant body. If you’re starting to get a Poltergeist-y sort of vibe from this description, you’re not wrong—and the comparison only gets more apt, with the minor exception that, surprise! This isn’t a haunted house movie after all. It’s all about Dalton, so the Lamberts can change houses all they want and the problem won’t go away; no matter where you go, there you are. (Or in Dalton’s case, there he isn’t.)
 
Insidious takes one step deeper into Poltergeist territory when Skeptic Dad, now fully convinced of the truth, astral-projects into The Further in order to rescue Dalton and bring him back to his unoccupied body before a demon can squat there. That’s the segment that the Netflix clip comes from, as Josh wends his way through The Further and past lots of restless dead folk in hopes of bring his son back to the land of the living; seems maybe a little problematic and/or spoilery of Netflix, but hey, it roped me in, so I guess it did what it was supposed to. And I guess I can’t claim any high ground on being spoilery, since I’m just going to come right out and say that Insidious also goes the Poltergeist route of “hey everything turned out okay / whoops, spoke too soon,” but that’s so common in the genre that I don’t think anyone’s going to be especially surprised.
 
So do I recommend Insidious? Heck yeah, though your mileage may vary—remember, James Wan gets me. Example: for whatever reason, I don’t usually react to jump scares in horror flicks. It’s not that I see them coming; most likely I’m just dead inside. But Insidious got me with multiple jump scares, and I could not be more pleased about that fact. Additionally, the creep factor is high throughout, so it’s not just the doll people near the end that wig me out. The characters are well-developed and well-acted by a fine cast, so I actually cared about what was happening to them, even though I had to keep fighting off the occasional intrusive thought of “hey, Josh is the pedophile dude from Hard Candy.”
 
Of course, it took me so long to write this that Insidious has left Netflix and I don’t see it on any other services, so now that I’ve told you to check it out, you’d have to shell out a rental fee. Guess I’m the jerk, here. But hey, the movie came out ten years ago and was a big deal back then (I mean, it spawned two sequels), so if you’re into this kind of movie and you don’t live under a rock like I do, the odds are good that you saw it ages ago and are wondering what the heck is wrong with me that I’ve only just seen it for the first time. Touché, buddy. Touché.
 
4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet
runningscared: witchcraft icon (witchcraft)
Movie: The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020), directed by McG
Watched on: Netflix
Ran: 7.13 miles, 9’08”/mile, 01:05:13 (light run)
 
The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)Not all that long before I started this ridiculous blog, I happened to catch the Netflix original The Babysitter during a late-night treadmill run and I fell in love with its odd mix of humor, splatter horror, and genuine heart. While rehydrating and reading more about this little gem of a film that I’d somehow missed for a couple of years, I discovered to my delight that a sequel was already in post-production! Ah, the occasional joys of being perennially late to the party. Fast-forward to today: The Babysitter: Killer Queen dropped this very morning, and I wasn’t going to wait around for long before checking it out. Would it succumb to the all-too-common yet dreaded sequelitis, and be a pale and unnecessary shadow of the original? Or would it join the rarefied ranks among the very few sequels that surpass their forebears?
 
Good news! The answer to both questions is “kindasorta”!
 
I won’t go into detail about what happened in The Babysitter (just watch it already, for cryin’ out loud, it’s great), but the one-sentence summary is that Cole discovers that his super-cool babysitter and her friends are actually a Satan-worshiping blood cult who perform human sacrifices in his living room after he’s gone to sleep, so they try to kill him, too, but he takes each of them out over the course of the night in a sort of horror-movie alternate timeline version of Home Alone. Caught up now? Great. Moving on.
 
TB:KQ picks up the story two years later: Cole is a high school junior now! Unfortunately, he’s deeply unpopular, in large part because no one believes his crazy tale about his satanic babysitter (despite the otherwise inexplicable deaths of multiple local kids and two cops, but whatever), but also because he voluntarily wears brown corduroy suits to school. You gotta feel that the second thing is pretty much all on him.
 
Anyway, concerned about his continuing “delusions,” Cole’s parents are about to ship him off to another school that specializes in psychiatric cases—in a nod to Halloween fans, the brochure says it’s in Haddonfield, IL—so Cole skips school AND town with his best-friend-and-crush Melanie to spend a weekend at a beach cabin, which would be ideal if not for Melanie’s boyfriend and a couple of his friends tagging along.
 
Well, things are looking up with kissing games and other teen hijinks, but then wouldn’t you know it: Satan stuff happens. Ain’t it always the way? The teens Cole killed two years ago are back from Limbo until sunrise, and if they can complete a certain ritual involving Cole’s blood before daybreak, they’re back for good. So Cole has to team up with the new girl, Phoebe, in hopes of keeping his blood in his body and away from any undead-raising rituals, and now he’s got to kill these demon-teens all over again, in (of course) the most entertaining, gory, and CGI-heavy ways possible.
 
Is it entertaining? I certainly thought so—it’s full of laughs and gore and almost everyone in the cast seems to be having fun with it. But here’s the thing: I’m inherently wary of any movie that has four credited writers. TB:KQ is absolutely one of those sequels where the folks in charge said “don’t worry about whether the plot makes sense—let’s just take all the things that made the first movie so popular and then do them again, only more and louder and maybe on a BEACH!” I have no doubt that The Babysitter has fans who mostly liked it for the kills and the pop culture references and the funny dialogue, and those people will probably love TB:KQ because all that stuff is cranked to 11. Unfortunately, the thing that I felt really gave the first movie a soul—Cole’s relationship with his babysitter Bee—is all but absent, and the result is a very fun movie that is nothing but empty calories. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sometimes you just want a cupcake for dinner.)
 
Actually, you know what it reminded me of? Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. (Bet you didn’t see THAT coming.) McG has directed a lot of stuff over the years, including the music video for “All Star” by Smash Mouth—so, uh… yeah—but to be honest, before the Babysitter flicks I only know him from the early-2000s Liu-Barrymore-Diaz Charlie’s Angels movies, which I actually kinda love for their sheer exuberance. It’s maybe a little weird how much TB:KQ feels like a McG Charlie’s Angels movie, from the bright colors and pop culture references and one-liners and incomprehensibly schizoid music choices (“Police Truck” by Dead Kennedys during a boat chase? Really?), all the way down to weirdly out-of-place-in-a-horror-flick elements like a bikini beach party in the blazing sun and a Hong Kong wire-work martial arts fight scene between oddly well-trained women. And while TB:KQ is clearly chock full of horror stuff like satanic blood cults and heads getting slowly torn off, the movie is shot and edited like a super-slick music video, so the tone is not at all what you might expect from a horror movie.
 
But overall, yep, I definitely enjoyed this sequel, and to say it’s better or worse than the original is kind of moot, because in some sense they’re totally different animals. I think maybe even those who made The Babysitter were surprised to have captured lightning in a bottle, and when they tried to reverse-engineer the process for TB:KQ they wound up with a hip new lightning-branded energy drink instead. It’s still a hell of a rush to drink it, though.
 
<BONUS WEIRD ASIDE> I feel like I should also mention that this movie has not one, but TWO ex-Disney Channel stars in major roles! Bella Thorne, who plays Bella Thorne Allison, was CeCe on Shake it Up!, while Phoebe is portrayed by none other than Jenna Ortega—Harley from Stuck in the Middle. I’m always happy to see Disney Channel alums graduating to horror. Go check out Sierra McCormick (Olive from A.N.T. Farm) in Some Kind of Hate if you want to see someone who dove right into the deep end. Also, I haven’t seen it yet, but Ross Lynch (Austin from Austin & Ally) played Jeffrey Dahmer in My Friend Dahmer before joining the cast of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and I’m also excited to see Dove Cameron (Liv and Maddie’s Liv… and, um, Maddie) in Issac next year. </BONUS WEIRD ASIDE>

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet
runningscared: classic icon (classic)
Movie: Phantasm (1979), directed by Don Coscarelli
Watched on: Amazon Prime
Ran: 6.67 miles, 9’09”/mile, 01:01:02 (light run)
 
I wound up having kind of a crappy run tonight—no biggie, it happens, I think I just hadn’t eaten enough today—but the saving grace was that I had decided to choose an unseen classic to run to, something that I should have seen forever ago and somehow had just never gotten around to watching. How fortunate, then, that I’d settled on Phantasm.
 
Phantasm (1979)You guys! HOW have I never seen this gem before? Let me give you the dizzying rundown from the perspective of a slightly-more-than-casual horror fan seeing this masterpiece for the first time: less than three minutes in you’ve already seen a couple gettin’ it on in a graveyard, bare breasts, and a dude stabbed to death with a dagger, so you think to yourself, okay, it’s that kind of 1979 horror flick. (Spoiler: you are wrong.)
 
Cut to the funeral, where the guy’s bandmates Jody and Reggie can’t believe that good ol’ Tommy “killed himself.” Jody’s 13-year-old brother Mike was kept away from the funeral because he was so traumatized by the death of their parents the previous year, but Mike’s got some abandonment issues (understandable) and follows Jody everywhere, and he’s been spying on the funeral through binoculars. Once the other mourners have departed, Mike sees the creepy undertaker lift the 500 lb. coffin from the gravesite and yeet it back into the hearse like it’s a sack of laundry. So now you think, hey, things are a little more interesting than I thought they’d be.
 
Next up is a scene with a psychic grandmother whose powers are apparently real enough to make things fade into and out of the physical plane of existence, so you readjust your expectations, only to have them rattled once more by a musical interlude of Jody and Reggie jamming out with guitars on the porch (the end shot of which led me to shout “IT’S CHEKHOV’S TUNING FORK!” and, reader, I was not wrong).
 
And then that is followed by Jody getting seduced by the same woman who killed Tommy—and if you weren’t already getting a strong Greg and Bobby Brady vibe from Jody and Mike, their wholesome “wows” upon seeing her topless will fix that—but before things get good-then-bad, Mike runs by screaming at the top of his lungs because a Jawa spooked him in the woods, so Jody gets to deliver the immortal and curiously deadpan line “What the heck? Wait here, it’s my little brother, I think he’s got some kind of a problem” with a pair of panties between his teeth.
 
Tonally all over the map, you say? Well buckle up, Buttercup, because we’re just gettin’ started. Mike straps a big honkin’ hunting knife to his leg and breaks into the Morningside Mortuary at night to investigate on his own, and before long is pursued by a creepy caretaker and a flying silver sphere—which eventually hits the caretaker instead, drills into his skull, and erupts a GEYSER of blood out the back. When he’s chased by the undertaker, Mike—who screamed in mortal terror when menaced by a Jawa—calmly cuts off the guy’s fingers with the knife, doesn’t even blink at the fact that his blood is yellow, and takes a still-moving finger with him as evidence as he skedaddles back home.
 
Back at the ranch, Jody coolly looks at the finger, which is still twitching and oozing French’s mustard (or maybe it’s Plochman’s, not sure), and deadpans, “okay, I believe you.” Then Reggie joins Team Phantasm when he sees that the finger has now turned into a gigantic flying insect that tries to kill them all. Luckily, the house has a working garbage disposal—and is also FULL OF GUNS, which come in handy when, two scenes later, the movie suddenly turns into a Dukes of Hazzard high-speed car chase and shootout. (“There’s nobody driving that mother,” says Jody; you have just seen that somebody, indeed, is driving that mother.)
 
I swear I did not set out to describe this entire movie scene-by-scene, but things keep getting more and more bonkers and I’m having trouble figuring out where to stop. It’s like at the beginning of every new scene, everything changes again and you feel that, okay, NOW the movie is starting.
 
Meanwhile, look, now Mike’s in an antique store and seeing the mortician in a vintage photograph! Guess it’s time to persuade the two young blondes running the shop to drive him home so he can warn Jody that the dude is immortal or something. If you’ve ever wanted to see three able-bodied youngsters get their asses handed to them by a Jawa while all four are squished into a classic Volkswagen Beetle, now’s your chance!
 
Follow that up with arguably the most nerve-wracking scene so far, in which Mike MacGyvers an escape from his bedroom by using a thumbtack, some Scotch tape, a live shotgun shell, and a hammer to blow a hole in his locked door. Eh, what could go wrong?
 
More gunplay, we are reminded that in the ’70s all cars explode if they run into a pole at more than 7 mph, and then Team Phantasm fights their way past a mysterious door in the mortuary to find a gleaming white room full of futuristic black barrels and the world’s biggest tuning fork (CALLED IT) that doubles as a transdimensional gateway to Tattooine—and, with a mere 17 minutes left on the clock, we finally find out that we are 100% absotively posilutely watching a science fiction movie.
 
And that’s where I’ll leave off, because even though the movie will pull the rug out from under you at least one more time, that’s practically a staple of the genre, and I have to leave something for you to look forward to. But if I haven’t made this clear, this movie is utterly bananas, in the best possible way.
 
I will say that although it appears on a lot of “Scariest Movies” lists, I didn’t find Phantasm to be scary in the slightest, but that doesn’t make me love it any less. Honestly, if a studio had cranked this out, it would have been schlocky AND soulless, and rightfully abandoned to the ashcan of time. What saves it is that it is bursting with heart. Phantasm is so clearly a labor of love you want to wrap it in a blankie and tenderly feed it muffins. The mere fact that a guy could write and direct what feels like the stanniest fanfiction of a franchise that only existed in his head makes you want to leap to your feet and cheer. That he did it on a shoestring budget and in the flippin’ ’70s—if you’re at least as ancient as I am, you know what I mean by this; if you aren’t, take my word for it, young ’un—is astounding.
 
So, thumbs up for this good time that I can only describe as “rollicking.” And while my expectations are suitably tempered, I do look forward to watching the four sequels.

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

runningscared: madness icon (madness)
Movie: Braid (2018), directed by Mitzi Peirone
Watched on: Amazon Prime
Ran: 7.53 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:07:56 (light run)
 
Braid (2018)Full disclosure: on balance, most people would say that I read too much into things. I was a literature major (sort of), and while that alone may tell you everything you need to know, I suspect you won’t fully appreciate the depth of what I’m saying until I also disclose that I watched I Know Who Killed Me twice, because I felt there may have been something more profound going on that was just beyond my grasp. Yes, I Know Who Killed Me. The movie in which Lindsay Lohan plays a stripper who gets a couple of limbs chopped off. That one. And the reason it’s so important that I tell you this is because tonight’s light-run movie was Braid.
 
I didn’t know the first thing about Braid when I cued it up—I went in 100% tabula rasa on this one, and I’m glad I did. At the outset, the plot seems straightforward enough: Petula and Tilda are two young women doing some desperate living, counting up the street value of the drugs they’re about to sell, when the police come a-knockin’ and they’re forced to flee and abandon their inventory. Now they have 48 hours in which to recoup the $80,000 they owe their supplier, so they ditch New York and hop a train back to Vermont, where they plan to visit their childhood friend Daphne. Daphne has a safe full of money hidden somewhere on her crumbling estate, but she’s a little… odd. Our two fugitives think they can find the safe and abscond with the cash, provided they play Daphne’s game. They are already familiar with the rules: 1) Everyone Must Play. 2) No Outsiders Allowed. 3) Nobody Leaves.
 
Even these simple facts are revealed piecemeal instead of being spoonfed to us. We have to do a little work to pull it together into a story, and in hindsight, that sets the tone for when things really go off the rails, and boy do they ever. Daphne’s game is a continuation of when the girls played house as little kids: Daphne is the mom, Tilda is her daughter, and Petula is a doctor giving Tilda her checkup—except now Petula checks Tilda’s reflexes with a hard swing to the knee with a meat tenderizer. And things get progressively more violent from there.
 
I don’t want to say much more about the story beyond the setup, because in some ways the film is more about the story than a means of telling the story, if that makes any sense (or even if it doesn’t). Everything about this movie is intended to disorient you. Time flashes backward and forward. Things that happen are undone moments later. Color becomes an agent of chaos—whereas Suspiria’s colors evoke nightmare, at least you knew something was out to get you; the colors in Braid evoke “bad drug trip” and inform you that god is dead but everything’s pretty. Camera angles don’t so much ignore gravity as stab it repeatedly and devour its corpse.
 
I think all of this conspires to short-circuit one’s ability to process linear progression and cause and effect. I often count paces while I’m running—yes, even while watching a horror movie. It’s just the way my brain is wired to process long, repetitive tasks. (Running for an hour sounds impossible; running for a minute sixty times in a row, not so much.) That said, I found I could not count paces while running to Braid. It’s just not that kind of a movie.
 
But I will say this: from a visual perspective, it is breathtakingly beautiful. Every shot is composed with an attention to detail bordering on the, well, obsessive. Several of the scenes (Tilda and Petula bound together with braided hair; the three women asleep and intertwined in a bathtub; the three in frilly dresses and porcelain masks as feathers float around them) taken as a whole feel like a series of photo shoots for the world’s weirdest calendar. 
 
One thing I do feel the need to mention is that I’ve seen a lot of reviews dinging this movie for “unrealistic” plot points, and that seems critically myopic to me. Yes, smashing in someone’s knee with a meat tenderizer will cripple them for life; yes, hitting someone in the head with a full-on swing from a baseball bat will do more than just knock them out cartoon-style for a little while. But these are not the plot holes the naysayers claim them to be—they are clues as to what’s real and what isn’t. And if that isn’t clear to you by the time disfiguring scars start miraculously disappearing, you might need a better attention span, because you almost certainly missed, for example, the Keyser Söze moment when the women are painting toward the end.
 
It’s hard to bottom-line a movie that has no bottom and precious few lines, but I can say that whether or not you will enjoy Braid will depend more than usual on your tastes and mood. If you like linear and unambiguous plots and are fond of telling yourself “that definitely happened,” you should stay away. If you enjoy ambiguity and mystery and don’t shy away from experimental narrative and film (and are allergic to neither challenge nor pretentiousness), you might get a lot out of Braid. And if you’re the type who lives and dies by what other people say, then Braid is either a thinker or it’s trash. Either way, it’s not an easy watch. I can tell you this, though: I’m definitely going to see it again.

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

runningscared: zombie icon (zombie)
Movie: Night of the Living Deb (2015), directed by Kyle Rankin
Watched on: Shudder, but it’s also on Amazon Prime
Ran: 7.04 miles, 8’52”/mile, 01:02:24 (bad-day recovery run)
 
So I had kind of a day, if ya know what I mean, and thus I bailed on my original plan to run long and slow over a meditative viewing of Argento’s Suspiria, because my mood would have ruined the experience. Instead I first went looking for something irredeemably violent and evil in hopes of catharsis, but after passing over a half-dozen perfectly suitable candidates without much enthusiasm, I realized what I really needed was something to make me laugh.
 
Night of the Living Deb (2015)If you spend any time among horror fans you may encounter the occasional dude (it’s pretty much always a dude) who insists that there’s no such thing as “horror comedy,” that comedy has no place in horror because if you’re laughing you must not be scared. That seems like a sad way to go through life, but hey, it takes all kinds—and my kind just happens to like the occasional chocolate in my peanut butter and peanut butter on my chocolate. And the mix can indeed go a lot of ways; for instance, I don’t think anyone’s going to deny that Evil Dead II is both scary as hell and also achingly funny at times. But tonight’s flick is Night of the Living Deb, which is… not that.
 
It’s important that I make this crystal clear: NotLD is pretty much a straight-up lighthearted romantic comedy with zombies running around. It is not scary. At all. I mean, maybe if you literally never watch anything even close to horror you might be a little freaked out to see zombies lurching around and getting hit by cars and decapitated by shotgun blasts, but at no point in NotLB will you ever feel that the protagonists are in danger, nor are you supposed to. If you have a problem with that, by all means, move along.
 
That said, while NotLD doesn’t horrify, I still consider it to be a horror film (and I guess Shudder agrees with me). It mines much of its humor from the well-known tropes of the zombie apocalypse, so open-minded horror fans might get a few more chuckles than someone unfamiliar with the oeuvre, but I do honestly feel that anyone in the mood for a mellow romcom would enjoy this movie. You wind up with lines like “Why do you have coconut water? Is this Maine, or Gilligan’s Island?” alongside “Dude, why are you eating a foot?!
 
The setup is a simple one. Deb is a super-awkward but spunky redhead—redheads in movies are either spunky or sultry… or witches, I guess—who musters enough courage to chat up Ryan (Portland, Maine’s Prettiest Man™) in a bar on Independence Day Eve. Cut to the next morning, when Deb wakes up in Ryan’s bed and doesn’t remember anything about the night before. Ryan seems just as confused but clearly feels the evening was a mistake. That might have been the end of Deb-and-Ryan (Reb? Dyan? Debby Ryan?), except, oh no! A zombie apocalypse has descended in the night! To make matters worse, it’s increasingly clear that Ryan’s tree-hugger ways clash with Deb’s down-to-earth sensibilities, but this reluctant odd couple thrust together by circumstance must work together to fend off the horde, get to Ryan’s dad’s mansion, and escape Portland with Ryan’s brother and his UH-OH, FIANCÉE in the governor’s helicopter. Oh, did I mention that Ryan’s dad’s company started the whole zombie outbreak in the first place? Hijinks ensue!
 
Let’s not mince words: NotLB could have been appallingly awful. It could have been a “hey, I thought of a punny title, let’s make a movie” movie. But you could say the same of Shaun of the Dead and that’s a modern classic, so who’s to judge? Well, I’ll tell you: me. I’m to judge. And while NotLD isn’t the love of my life, it’s definitely the fun acquaintance with whom I’d gladly while away an evening in the bar. Mostly this is because of Deb, who is perfectly portrayed by Maria Thayer (oh my GOD, it’s Tammi Littlenut from Strangers With Candy! Jeez I’m old). I could watch and listen to Deb all night, awkwardly spouting movie quotes and Longfellow poems. But the real key is the chemistry between Deb and Ryan—not so much romantic, but comedic. The bickering between them is perfection and there’s little I appreciate more than good characterization and snappy dialogue.
 
This was my second viewing of NotLD, and I regret nothing. I’ll probably watch it several times more. It would go well with Shaun of the Dead and both Zombieland movies if you were looking to do a Zombie Romcom evening, but just keep in mind that this is the romcommiest of the four.

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

runningscared: witchcraft icon (witchcraft)
Movie: The Woods (2006), directed by Lucky McKee
Watched on: Amazon Prime
Ran: 7.64 miles, 8’57”/mile, 01:08:23 (recovery run)
 
Yesterday was a weight-training day, which meant that today my legs were achy and weak—which in turn meant that tonight’s run, even more than usual, was going to have to start slow and build over the course of an hour. So what could I watch to match that dynamic?

The Woods (2006)Well, as luck would have it, some site or other had posted one of those “everything new streaming this month” articles, and what should I notice in the Prime list but The Woods? And not just any The Woods—for there are several—but the one near and dear to my heart: Lucky McKee’s long-awaited followup to his 2002 indie horror debut, May.
 
May remains one of my favorite horror flicks of all time (yes, I’ll be rewatching it soon enough). I anxiously awaited McKee’s sophomore effort, but it lingered in corporate purgatory for years. Once it finally surfaced in 2006 I was worried that it couldn’t possibly live up to my inflated expectations… and honestly, I was right. It’s no May. But that doesn’t mean I don’t adore it in its own right.
 
The Woods has a lot for me to love: McKee’s direction, of course; the tone-perfect Agnes Bruckner as our hero Heather; Patricia Clarkson as a quietly diabolical headmistress; evil murdery vines; WITCHES, WITCHES, WITCHES; and last but certainly not least, Agnes’s father portrayed by none other than genre legend Square-Jawed Bruce Campbell™. (Yes, that’s his full legal name.)
 
Oh, and a plot AND tone so reminiscent of Argento’s classic Suspiria—another of my all-time favorites—it doesn’t so much walk the fine line between homage and plagiarism as grind any distinction between the two into a thin, delicious paste I hereby dub “homagiarism.” (BAM! Take that, Shakespeare!) Heather is a troublesome girl who tried to burn down her house. Her parents are therefore dumping her at a secluded New England boarding school. Things are weird pretty much right off the bat, and it’s not long before Heather is balancing pencils on their tips and hearing voices from the surrounding woods. It’s clear to the viewer, if not necessarily to the student body, that this here school is run by witches.
 
Heather is granted a scholarship because she’s apparently aced a written test to see if she’s “gifted” (it’s basically the witchcraft edition of the Myers-Briggs test on homemade paper that STEALS YOUR BLOOD), and fifteen minutes into the film’s runtime she’s dreaming about axe murders and a fellow student she’s never met who “attempted suicide.” Soon enough other scholarship students begin disappearing in the night and are replaced in their beds by piles of leaves, which is not at all suspicious. When is it Heather’s turn? The action builds slowly, and things don’t get really frantic until the third reel, when it all comes to a head, the forest gets frisky, the witches are forced into the open, and the body count graph gets steep in a hurry.
 
Did I mention this all takes place in 1965? That’s right, cats and kittens: this is a groovy period piece that only enhances the feel of Heather’s utter geographical and social isolation. The costumes feel spot-on, and the film looks like the 50-year-old slides you found in a box in the crawlspace. It’s gorgeous. They play with saturation levels: a lot of the blood is undersaturated, in stark contrast to what most horror films do, while occasionally (especially in dream sequences and the like) the saturation is cranked way up to accentuate Heather’s red hair against the forest green. Bruckner’s not a natural redhead, but this film makes good use of the ol’ “redheads are witches” trope, so you can see what they were going for. (This leads to one of the movie’s only glaring anachronisms, as I’m pretty sure the term “fire-crotch” didn’t come into use until the early ‘90s. But I can forgive a lot.)
 
I suspect fans of genre horror might find this one too slow to hold their attention (durn kids these days!), but if you appreciate characterization and conspiracy and films that are beautiful to look at, give this one a whirl. This is one of those movies that’s definitely horror, but not necessarily one that people who dislike horror should avoid. It does occasionally and briefly get graphic, but not distastefully so, if that makes any sense. Look, if you can’t hang with watching a ‘60s-era boarding school redhead swing an axe at a bunch of tree-witches, I don’t know what else I can do for you. You may be beyond hope.

4.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

December 2020

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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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