.

Watched on: Shudder

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Watched on: Amazon Prime

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.14 miles, 9’12”/mile, 01:05:44 (recovery run)

 

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!

 

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 6.67 miles, 8’21”/mile, 55:44 (quick run)

 

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.

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.20 miles, 8’44”/mile, 01:02:58 (recovery run)

 

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.
 

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.